Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969
One spring day in 1969, Roger Rosenblatt was puzzling over Wallace  Stevens's "Anecdote of a Jar" with his Harvard students. But discourse about  ordering poetic universes seemed to end when that class did: "During the hour I  was teaching, about three hundred students and others seized University Hall."Coming Apartis a record of his own nervous responses to cultural cataclysm,  along with those of students includingJames Atlas,Al Gore, Martin Peretz, andJames Fallows.With his trademark mix of quizzicality and reason, Rosenblatt strives to understand  "the folklore of the moment," the politics that led to the student takeover and  the rift it left behind. He is strong on the individual response though less secure when it  comes to the general: "I do not know why, but there was an impulse running under  the events of that spring to let things go to hell, and it was acted upon by young and old  alike." Sterner commentators have before now critiqued Rosenblatt's supercivilized  examinations of the American psyche, andComing Apartcan only provide more  ammunition. The wars of his subtitle may seem too tame for some, but Roger Rosenblatt  convinces that the wounds (particularly his own) are permanent.