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Classmates, The: Privilege, Chaos, and the End of an Era | 
 enlarge | Author: Geoffrey Douglas
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $23.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 77156
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 1401301967
Dewey Decimal Number: 373.74272
EAN: 9781401301965
ASIN: 1401301967
Publication Date: June 3, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Book Description
Fifty years ago, in the fall of 1957, two thirteen-year-old boys were enrolled at an elite, boys-only New England boarding school. One of them, descended from wealth and eminence, would go on to Yale, then to a career as a navy officer and Vietnam war hero, and finally to the U.S. Senate, from where he would fall just short of the White House. The other was a scholarship student, a misfit giant of a boy from a Pennsylvania farm town who would suffer shameful debasements at the hands of his classmates, then go on to a solitary and largely anonymous life as a salesman of encyclopedias and trailer parts--before dying, alone, twelve months after his classmate's narrow loss on Election Day 2004. It is around these two figures, John Kerry and a boy known here only as Arthur, the bookends of a class of one hundred boys, that Geoffrey Douglas--himself a member of that boarding-school class--builds this remarkable memoir. His portrait of their lives and the lives of five others in that class--two more Vietnam veterans with vastly divergent stories, a federal judge, a gay New York artist who struggled for years to find his place in the world, and Douglas himself--offers a memorable look back to a generation caught between the expectations of their fathers and the sometimes terrifying pulls of a society driven by war, defiance, and self-doubt. The class of 1962 was not so different from any other, with its share of swaggerers and shining stars, outcasts and scholarship students. Its distinction was in its timing: at the precise threshold of the cultural and political upheavals of the late 1960s. The world these boys had been trained to enter and to lead, a world very similar to their fathers', would be exploded and recast almost at the moment of their entrance--forcing choices whose consequences were sometimes lifelong. Douglas's chronicle of those times and choices is both a capsule history of an era and a literary tour de force.
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| Customer Reviews:
 An Inside Look August 19, 2008
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!
The Classmates by Geoffrey Douglas June 23, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
 Awkward pastiche June 5, 2008
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
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.
John and Arthur June 3, 2008
13 out of 16 found this review helpful
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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