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Loading... Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachieverby Walter Kirn
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book.  br77rino | Aug 1, 2009 |  Well written if a little glib. Whatever prevented him from reading all that time? (  ) KimLarae | Jul 29, 2009 | It's hard to come up with an incisive review of a book when it took you about an hour to read on a bumpy bus. So for entertaining travel reading, I give it five stars. However, I found Kirn's memoir of sorts to be excessively self-indulgent, excessively "woe-is-me," and (I hope, at least) exaggerated. Either that, or Kirn and his fellow Princetonians live in a hellish netherworld that is completely unfamiliar. What I did like, though, were his reflections on being elite, on being somebody who can spit up a good SAT score without understanding or enjoying the material, his ability to pose his way through countless English classes, and his writing style. The book is not as satisfying as I'd like it to be, and rather than reading like a psychological exploration of the self or an exploration of the educational system, it comes off as a series of sexcapades and drug binges relevant to the story only because they happened at Princeton. ( ) aliay | Jul 24, 2009 | I liked this memoir. It reinforced for me some thoughts I've had in the last 20 years about what kind of teaching is going on in English departments at universities and colleges across the nation. Post-modernism be damned. There are books that are classics, that have something to teach us about being human, and the smug purveyors of literary theory claptrap are nothing but intellectual phonies. Kirn begins his real education when he proceeds to start reading from the canon. This is a book worth reading. ( ) CarmenOhio | Jun 21, 2009 | Read 50 pages and moved on. sarahthelibrarian | Jun 5, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
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| Book description |
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"Percentile is destiny in America."
So says Walter Kirn, one of our best observers and interpreters of American life, in this whip-smart memoir of his own long strange trip through American education. Working his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings, Kirn launched himself eastward from his rural Minnesota hometown to the ivy-covered campus of Princeton University. There he found himself not in a temple of higher learning so much as an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing, ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature classes was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and actual reading of the books under consideration was optional. Just on the other side of "the bell curve's leading edge" loomed a complete psychic collapse.
LOST IN THE MERITOCRACY reckons up the costs of a system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American meritocracy.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:11 -0400)
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I think the Atlantic article was a better piece of writing, because it was a coherent piece. Its being fleshed out into this book for the most part just dilutes the original point.
There is one story that was added in this novelization which exemplifies the whole: Mr. Kirn helped out with a student-created play on the Princeton campus, called "Plants and Waiters." The curtain opens with a stage that is empty except for a large number of potted plants. There is silence. The silence continues. As the audience "waits" for something to happen, the authors snicker backstage, wondering how long it will take for someone to leave. (