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Title: Classmates, The: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era
ISBN: 1401301967
Author:
Geoffrey Douglas
Publicate Date: 2008-06-03
Publish: 2008-06-03
List Price: $23.95
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Hardcover
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $5.28
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $7.20
Amazon Merchant Price: $17.96
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| Customer Review: |
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1: What is a St. Paul's boy?
The Classmates opens with a scene of cruelty as sport hatched by classmates at St. Paul's, a school for boys. A scholarship student, always short of money and willing to earn it sits on a toilet in an open field mid winter as his classmates walk by and laugh. In the fall of 1957 the new class of boys entered St. Paul's, and elite New England boarding school. Geoffrey Douglas was the son and brother of a St. Paul boy and started his St. Paul's education that year... When John Kerry announced his bid for the presidency in 2000, boys of St. Paul's began to talk to each other....John Kerry had once been one of them. The letters, e-mails, phone calls and visits piqued Douglas's curiosity. How did being a St. Paul's boy shape the men they became? What ever happened to the young man perched on the toilet, subjected to his classmate's stares and scorn?
Geoffrey Douglas focuses on several classmates and the varied paths they took once leaving the school. Almost to a man, they talked of the loneliness and sense of being an outsider among their peers.....even those seemingly seemed secure in their positions in school society. Shaped by the school, family expectations, Vietnam, drugs, college, divorce and failures among other things, these men talk about the events and choices in their lives whose consequences sometime lasted a lifetime. Most fascinating is the attempt to talk to John Kerry, himself, and the traits that colored his school career and seem to last to this day. Douglas is forthright and candid about his struggles. The trust some of his classmates put in his abilities to fairly and humanly portray their stories was well placed. This is a small snapshot of a time and place long gone.
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2: An Inside Look
An exceptional look at a prestigious American prep school where wealth, Christianity and high moral values co-existed with adolescent cruelties and life-altering snobbery. Filled with rich and candid autobiographical detail. Better than fiction!
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3: The Classmates by Geoffrey Douglas
Classmates, The: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era
Interesting & well written look at the lives of "privileged" boys starting in their private school days.
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4: Awkward pastiche
Interesting idea, but it has been done better. Lots of autobiography, not enough about classmates and faculty. Author (as he admits) never got more that a very formal 45-minute unenlightening interview with Kerry, which isn't much of a hook to hang his hat on - seems more like a publisher's publicity gimmick than a real theme of the book. I'm in this generation and was there (another Northeastern prep school, '61, Vietnam service, Harvard) so have a lot in common with these guys, but the book never took off for me. There are a few flashes of interesting anecdotes and some serviceable prose, but the book never coheres. Good on personal nostalgia, not so good on pulling together what it all means.
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5: John and Arthur
Douglas, Geoffrey. "Classmates", Hyperion, 2008.
John and Arthur
Amos Lassen
It is the fall of 1957 and John and Arthur, two fifteen year old boys, are at an exclusive New England boarding school. This is the setting of Geoffrey Douglas' new book, "Classmates". John came from a wealthy family and his future was filled with promise. Arthur was a scholarship student from a Pennsylvania farming family whose future was shaky at best. The boys' class was made up of one hundred boys and it is the student population that Douglas uses as the source of his memoir. The boys were divided---their fathers expected success but the guys lived in a society that was in the middle of a disastrous war in Vietnam, a sexual revolution at home and an age when people were filled with questions and doubt.
I remember those years all too well as this is my generation. We were interested politically, we experimented sexually, we were afraid of being drafted and we tuned in and dropped out. Here we stood at the door waiting to move from the 50's to the 60's and we hoped for a better world. We, as did the classmates of Douglas' book, were witness to both the political and social changes and upheavals of the late 60's and we watched the world change drastically. The decade of the 60's was to change the world forever and we still feel the results today.
Douglas has written a compelling book that looks at the changes that America and the world went through and he uses the characters of John and Arthur as our guides. John is John Kerry who went on to college at Yale, became a war hero in Vietnam and was later elected to the Senate of the United States and then attempts a bid at the Presidency. Quite the opposite is Arthur (whose surname is not given, perhaps to emphasize that his life was as anonymous as he was) who went on to nothingness, a life of little meaning and ultimately a salesman who died alone a year after his classmate loss the election. Peppered through the book are other classmates which reflect the diversity of American life. There are two other war veterans, a federal judge, a gay artist and the author himself. Together these classmates watched as a new world was created and worked to find their place in it.
"Classmates" is a short book but one that is powerful. It reopens those old wounds that many of us have carried and it explains a period of time that almost defies explanation. It reminded me so much of the time I spent trying to come to terms with who I was and where I fit. "Classmates" is a remarkable study and my generation should welcome it into their minds and libraries.
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