Border Crossings

By Daniel. Peters

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060133074
• ISBN13: 9780060133078
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 313 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Right on! Deja vu.

Many authors have tried to capture the turbulence on college campuses during Vietnam. Most have focused on that fateful year of 1968. This one begins in the fall of 1969 as Matthew Craft and his community of loonies begin their senior year at Yale. Playing out in a fabric surrounded by the events of the time, it captures the mood better than any I have ever read. I, too, was a college senior that year, and the experiences here echoed eerily in the back of my mind from the first page to the last. Its description of issues global, local, and personal were often so accurate as to be downright CREEPY. They conjured up my own life vividly and often. The moratorium, the draft lottery, the bombing of Cambodia, Kent State, and so much more play out in almost painful reality. Yet the author always balances the comedies, dramas, and tragedies deftly, reminding us that the time included beautiful moments as well as difficult ones. You can laugh along with the characters' triumphs and at the absurdities that emerge at every turn, and your heart breaks when events overtake the people involved. No one who did not live through that time can appreciate the agonies of the country and the controversies that raged at every turn. Some of the episodes here are stark, even shocking, but they ring true to those of us who were there. If you think the country is divided against itself today, read this marvelous novel, set in a time when the nation was indeed bleeding both philosophically and literally.