HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES

Literary Corner: A Look at Three New Literary Works

By Sally Baker
Assistant Director, News Office

Three new literary productions with a Harvard connection hit the bookstores recently. Two are provocative works of nonfiction by distinguished Harvard professors: one a collection of classic essays on economic competition, the other a sobering look at the contemporary notion of justice and healing following mass atrocity. And in a completely different vein, Colby College professor James Finney Boylan takes his readers on an amusing fictional tour of Northeastern colleges, including the one on the Charles.

On Competition

Michael E. Porter's latest book, On Competition (Harvard Business Review Books, 1998), is a collection of landmark essays written for the Harvard Business Review since 1979, with two new pieces produced specifically for this volume. Porter, the C. Roland Christensen Professor of Business Administration at the Business School, is among the world's leading experts in business competition and strategy. Several of the articles included in On Competition have defined entirely new areas of research in this field.

The book is organized in three sections: "Competition and Strategy: Core Concepts," "The Competitiveness of Locations," and "Competitive Solutions to Societal Problems," in which Porter posits ways in which problems like health care and urban poverty can be addressed with strategies of competition.

"If this collection could convey only one message," Porter writes in the book's introduction, "I would want it to be a sense of the staggering power of competition to make things better- both for companies and for society."

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness

"There are no tidy endings following mass atrocity," writes Law School Professor Martha Minow in Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Beacon Press, 1998).

This century may well be remembered for mass atrocities - in Armenia, Rwanda, Eastern Europe, Nigeria, and the Balkans, to cite a handful of examples - but it is not unique in producing genocide. What is different, Minow says, is the 20th-century approach to retribution for systematic violence and wholesale slaughter. We establish vehicles, such as the International Criminal Court and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to mete out healing consequences ' what Minow calls "some rejoinder to the unspeakable destruction and degradation of human beings."

Yet, having examined a number of those rejoinders, Minow concludes that "no response can ever be adequate when your son has been killed by police ordered to shoot at a crowd of children; when you have been dragged out of your home, interrogated, and raped in a wave of 'ethnic cleansing'; or when your brother who struggled against a repressive government has disappeared and left only a secret police file."

Between Vengeance and Forgiveness, she says, is "a fractured meditation on the incompleteness and inescapable inadequacy of every response . . . a missive to the next generation, in the next century, in the fearful acknowledgment that we are not done with mass violence, nor expert in recovering from it."

Getting In

Getting In (Warner Books, 1998) is novelist James Finney Boylan's slightly off-kilter take on the college admissions process. An associate professor of English at Colby College, Boylan is the author of two previous novels and a collection of short stories, all of which are tinged with surrealism. His characters always seem to exist in a blurry but recognizable version of real life.

The novel follows the adventures of two families and one guest/boyfriend/hanger-on as they travel the visiting-colleges route from Connecticut to Massachusetts to Maine to New York. Harvard appears, of course, once as the romancer of Juddy, a world-class fencer who could save a coach's job, and also as the tantalizing, unreachable goal at the end of a Boston traffic snarl. At one point during the frustrating, funny traffic jam en route to a disappearing interview, an interesting question arises:

	Dylan spoke up, "I don't see what the big deal is about Harvard, anyway."
	"The big deal," Polo said, "I think I can explain about the big deal. There's Harvard, okay, and there's everywhere else."

All of the characters share one desire: they wish they could go back and retake one critical test in their lives - a decision to marry; a choice between the truth and a lie; a failed chance to do something good. Dylan, who skipped an answer blank on the SATs, causing him to mis-answer all the subsequent questions, concludes that "girls are like college," and thinks, "The only difference [is] that with college you took SATs whereas with girls there were all these other secret tests you took and failed without even knowing it. It would be nice, actually, to know what your scores were in life. That way you wouldn't keep trying to ask out Stanford when in all probability you'd wind up married to somebody like the University of Las Vegas." Still, rattling along, evolving, in their crowded Winnebago, Dylan and all of the characters find reasons to move away from regret toward new choices. Including the fencer, who goes to Harvard.