ON THE SHELF

Two recent graduates have subjects the College to a comic book analysis with 57 witty and perceptive cartoons and a short, sometimes amusing text. David G. Braaten drew most of the cartoons for the CRIMSON while he was its staff cartoonist in 1947-49. He has added several more since his graduation to bring the 62-page volume up to date.

William S. Fairfield's text is not a commentary. It breaks down in many places, particularly into six chapters, entitled: Education, Once Upon a Time, Organized Social Life, Girls and Sublimation, Administration, and Environment. The first chapter itself breaks down into analyses of the three characteristic types of Harvard student: the grifter, the amateur aesthete, and the course-regurgitator.

Where the text of the CRIMSON's 1947-48 managing editor really breaks down is in its lack of continuity and its frequently too obvious striving to put across a punchline.

Sometimes this pays off, witness:

"In the 57 years of its solitary reign, the little college in Cambridge, Massachusetts graduated such varied and influential men as Samuel Mather, Nathaniel Mather, Eleazar Mather, Warham Mather, Increase Mather, Cotton Mather, and one Caleb Cheeshahteaumuck, an Indian who forsook the fresh air of Martha's Vineyard for the schoolroom and as a result died of tuberculosis a year after graduation."

On the other hand, a few pages later the following passage occurs: "Harvard provides husbands for over seventy percent of all Radcliffe women--and the figures range downward from there for all the other girls' schools in the vicinity. Some claim that this is a good thing, as no one else would have a Harvard man. We have heard several wives of Harvard men express approximately this opinion. 'No one else would have a Harvard man,' they say."

DAB's cartoons, however, maintain a consistently high level of humor. In addition to the familiar classics which graced this very page in years gone by, one finds the ill-shaven young man telling a quartet of follow Communists in Cronin's: "Oh, don't get the wrong. Some of my best friends are club men." Or the doctor in the Hygiene Department yelling at a student running a temperature so high that his hair is singed: "What do you want for $30... TWO aspiris?"

The best of the new drawings are the eight personifications of the Houses. For obvious reasons, Dudley is a bushy-haired lad with a dubious expression and a book-bag suspended from his neck. For reasons obvious only to Braaten, Leverett has two heads, both fairly dull and sleepy looking, and one with a pimple on the end of its nose.

Also included are the memorable Coop robbery, Lamont opening, John Harvard, and adviser cartoons. The cartoons are the thing, of course--Inside Harvard's excuse for being. The text is not bad; indeed it is indispensable, for the drawings are not all the same size and few of them fill a whole page.

Braaten is probably the best cartoonist Harvard has had since Gluyas Williams, and for this reason alone the book is worth owning.