Word: vigeland
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...bits of the bun, is usually considered nice - nice but dull, all muted colors, leafy parks and elegant 19th century mansions. But look past the main tourist draws: the Viking Ship Museum; the 14th century Akershus Fortress, which has guarded Oslofjord through nine sieges; the sculpture garden with Gustav Vigeland's 14-m-tall Monolith, a phallic column of 121 writhing human figures. The city has plenty of other artistic, architectural and even culinary gems - the raisins in the bun. You just have to know where to walk. Step one: cross the Aker River. Before the 1624 fire that destroyed...
...mention briefly just a few more shortcomings: Vigeland's coverage of the South Africa/divestment question is spotty and scattered; long quotes full of Wall Street buzzwords are strung together without explanation; and dozens of observations can only be called stupid--as, for instance, "The tiny typing discrepancy in the presence of periods in 'C.L.' and their absence in 'MCL' gave the paper the appearance that it hadn't been proofread...
Only two parts of Great Good Fortune are redeeming at all. The first is the introduction, where Vigeland has a surprisingly candid conversation with Nathan M. Pusey '28, the president of Harvard who called in the Staties to smash the heads of several of Vigeland's classmates when they took over University Hall in 1969. Looking back at those years, Pusey lets down his guard enough to say that his real disappointment was not with the radicals but with the faculty, who failed to stand up to them: "I've never said this to anyone but my wife," Pusey admits...
...after 160 intervening pages of pablum, Vigeland offers a wonderful description of hijinks at the Harvard Management Company, the University's downtown moneymen, and their star, $240,000-a-year trader Bing Sung. Vigeland humorously captures the irony of stock- and bond-traders shouting at each other, manning three telephones at once, pioneering new kinds of financial deals--all for the benefit of the world's stodgiest university...
Still, these two passages do nothing to save Great Good Fortune. Vigeland has not done enough reporting really to understand how Harvard raises, invests, and spends its money, to tie it into a package, put it into perspective, and say something that hasn't been said before...