Garrett’s memoir offers an instructive peek at a Harvard that has been transformed … One hopes that the intellectual environment of Harvard today is more fascinating than the one that hardly makes an appearance in Garrett’s memoir. He discusses no class that left an impression him, no book to which he was introduced, no idea that grabbed him, no teacher with whom he was enthralled. He describes excitedly a dinner that he and some classmates shared with Malcolm X. He says that on account of that meeting, ‘something shifted inside my juvenile mind and soul.’ Perhaps so. But I would more confidently credit the claim if it was substantiated by some contemporaneous evidence … What many would see as a remarkable stroke of good fortune is eclipsed in Garrett’s telling by the recrudescence of fears and frustrations that he had briefly consigned to the past.
