From the Coop Those Harvard Books

AS REUNIONITES stroll through the Coop looking for souvenirs of college days, they will find the usual assortment of Harvard mugs, Harvard scarves. Harvard ties, ash trays, key rings, chairs, lamps, skivvies, garters, diapers, playing cards, glasses, pencils, cigarette lighters, and cocktail shakers. This year, there is also a large assortment of new Harvard books-books by undergraduates and alumn that purport to tell something about the Harvard and American Youth of today.

Of the seven "Harvard books" that have received the most attention, three are supposedly critical analyses of the Harvard occupation and ensuing developments in April 1969: one is a general look at Youth: two are novels about Youth at Harvard: and one is in that not-unfamiliar genre of the alumnus looking back.

The best place to start is at the top. At this very moment. Erich Segal's Love Story (New York: Harper and Row $4.95) is at the very top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list. Segal (Harvard 58) is a classics professor at Yale who runs in the Boston marathen and wrote the screenplay for the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine. His moist saga of a Harvard-Radcliffe romance circa-1965 was originally published in Ladies' Home Journal. Segal says. "Thirteen million readers of Ladies' Home Journal have learned something about what college kids are doing today." He bases this hope on the fact that his short novel (130 small pages of large type and generous margins) has girls swearing and sleeping with boys and things like that. (Of course there are a lot of things like that it doesn't have, too.)

Here's the plot: A preppy jock from Winthrop House meets, falls in love with, and marries over his father's objections a beautiful but poor Cliffie from Cranston. Rhode Island on a music scholarship, but she dies of leukemia.

The quality of Segal's writing is consistent from the very first sentence of the book to the very last. Here is the first sentence: "What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?" Here is the last: "I cried."

The other novel is Windsong by Nicholas Gagarin '70 (New York: William Morrow, $5.95). Windsong received a sympathetic pan from the CRIMSON (he is former Executive Editor) and a brief, incisive kick to the groin from the Times. It is a somewhat disjointed account of one-boy-or-several boys life at Harvard. The amusements Nick's hero(es) engage(s) in are of the drugs-and-bizarre relationships variety, but plus ca change -of the two main girls in our little boy's life, he meets one at his St. Paul's commencement and another at a Fly Club garden party. (A dramatic peak-such as it is-in the book comes when Flo tells Hal she can't afford to go skiing with him in Austria over Christmas, but will probably end up just going skiing with her family in Vermont. "But I'll manage." she promises.)

E. J. Kahn Jr. 37 of the New Yorker spent a year here doing research for his book. It was originally titled It Can't Happen Here; so much for analysis. Harvard Through Change and Storm (New York: W. W. Norton, $7.50), as the revised version was called, is a pleasant enough romp through Harvard lore, past and present-the kind of book that gets written every five years or so, and written well every 20. You're probably due for one about now.

The labrary Journal called The Whole World Is Watching: A Young Man Looks at Youth's Dissent (New York: Viking Press, paper $1.25) by Mark Gerzon '70, "required reading for the over-thirty generation." The CRIMSON said. "Mark Gerzon's excursion into pop sociology reads like a work commissioned by Look Magazine.... Reaching for the profound insight. Gerzon ends up only with a smug revision of Youth Wants to Know.... Many of these ruminations on the younger generation make sense only from the myopic perspective of an Ivy League existence." Whether you will like the book depends, I, guess, on which journal you find yourself more in sympathy with.

The CRIMSON, Life. and McCall's all greeted The Harvard Strike by four reporters from WHRB. Harvard Radio (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, $6.95, paper $3.95) as the clearest, most factual and complete, exposition of the events of April 1969. Nonetheless, the CRIMSON said, " The Harvard Strike has a flaw: much of it is unreadable. Through a number of verbal and conceptual errors, the authors have smothered parts of their story in gooey, impenetrable prose. 'Boring' is too simple a term for the complex problems that plague the book, but readers may find the effect the same." Alumni with a truly unquenchable thirst for the facts about that April, however, are best off with this book.

They should certainly avoid Richard Zorza's The Right To Say We: The Adventures of a Young Englishman at Harvard and in the Youth Movement (New York: Praeger, paper $2.25). Whatever things Zorza's book may have going for it, facts are not among them. Culminating all the sloppy inaccuracies, the book is dedicated (inexplicably) to the city manager of Cambridge, whose first name Zerza gets wrong. Although the most smoothly written of the three strike books. Zorza's book alternates from wallowing in romanticism about Youth and Togetherness to trampling through the most incredibly arcane details of moderate student politics. If you're prepared to get teary-eyed over the liberal Faculty's caucus's reaction to the results of the second Stadium meeting then The Right To Say We is for you.

Which leaves Steven Kelman's Push Comes To Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest (Houghton Mifflin, $5.95, paper $2.95). (Does a colon in the title lend an air of legitimacy to an undergraduate's first published writings?) Despite, or perhaps because of, one of the nastiest reviews the CRIMSON has ever written. Shove is completely sold out at the Coop. President Pusey reportedly distributes copies to his friends. The book has been heralded across the country as at last printing the truth about the hypocrisy of student radicals. Though the core of Kelman's analysis of radical actions at Harvard is perhaps cogent, it is overblown into a wild-eyed, finger-pointing attack on personalities because of Kelman's pique at radicals who he believes stole issues and student support from his own Young People's Socialist League.

PERHAPS what Harvard needs is a good non-fiction novel about a pot-smoking radical from St. Paul's who has an affair with an assistant professor from the liberal caucus whom he meets secretly in the Widener archives and who gets arrested in a demonstration but dies of meningitis in jail before his rich, conservative magazine-writer father can sell the movie rights. Or perhaps a good book-burning.