317

Beyond mundane duties, such as storing one's record for the edification of prospective employers, a yearbook should stimulate and preserve memories of a year at College. Most yearbooks translate this into firing squad pictures, exhaustive lists of names, and straightforward accounts of the year's highlights. The Harvard Yearbook has added the entirely praiseworthy aim of evoking, by way of salon photography and a high standard of literacy, the College's atmosphere.

Laudable as this may be it raises difficult problems. One stems from an author's bias which colors his attempt to find the common denominator of whatever he is discussing. This is particularly serious at Harvard whose diversity is notorious, and "317" hardly escapes its effects. Whoever wrote the freshman section, for instance, painted a lugubrious picture of innocent first year men grinding away over their books, never realizing how little work is necessary to secure a degree. While this is accurate for some, there are many whose experience was different and therefore to whom this section will mean nothing. The House articles are uniformly tub-thumping as are many of the others, an attitude by no means uniform in "317's" readers. Nonetheless, this sort of trouble is, I think, inevitable, and the Yearbook has avoided its more objectionable forms.

Another and more difficult problem is the tendency of the more ambitious ideal to swallow up the essential one, thus making the result a mere literary effort of no value to future octogenarians. "312" has a number of articles which combine the two aims admirably, such as the one on Eliot House which in a smooth, choicely worded style captures the House's spirit as well as naming names and infinitum. In general, though, its prose is little more than pedestrian and, in the lead article's case, downright inadequate and dull; neither atmosphere nor details come through well.

The photographs, too, are disappointing. Though some are very dramatic, most of them are nondescript. What's worse, there are too few line-ups, too few faces, and what ones were printed are too often labeled with some cute phrase rather than names. It is of course impossible to run firing squads of such vast groups as PBH, but surely it is not too much to expect a picture of the whole football team, of the Advocate staff, or of the Harvard Young Democrats.

That the Yearbook fails to combine spirit and detail successfully though, is no excuse for relegating "317" to the scrapbasket. "Adequate" may not express rapture, but adequacy is nonetheless a virtue. Completeness--almost every schlor's picture and biography appear, and all the College's many divisions and groups are covered--and above all accuracy, a trait which "316" so lamentably lacked, abound in "317," and any yearbook which has these has all the essential ingredients it needs. If the frosting is sere, at least the cake is wholesome.