Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

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Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever

3.01 of 5 stars 3.01 · rating details · 482 ratings · 120 reviews

Percentile is destiny in America.”
So says Walter Kirn, a peerless observer and interpreter 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-covere...more

Hardcover, 224 pages

Published May 19th 2009 by Doubleday (first published 2008)

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Apr 04, 2011 Steven rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: someone who is interested in the field of education AND wants something quick, easy, and fun to read

I first heard of this book when I saw it referenced tangentially in a recent Jonathan Alter column. I expected it to be a relatively serious (i.e. “scholarly”) work of non-fiction, but it turned out to be a breezy light-hearted memoir from a 40-something novelist about his trip through the American education system and how he worked his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings.

From rural Minnesota where his father moved the family when he was a sma...more I first heard of this book when I saw it referenced tangentially in a recent Jonathan Alter column. I expected it to be a relatively serious (i.e. “scholarly”) work of non-fiction, but it turned out to be a breezy light-hearted memoir from a 40-something novelist about his trip through the American education system and how he worked his way up the ladder of standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and class rankings.

From rural Minnesota where his father moved the family when he was a small child in order to live out some sort of deluded fantasy of simple pastoral farm life, the author, Walter Kirn, invokes The Great Gatsby early and often throughout his narrative. In the opening pages he explains his youthful ambition by describing how he had graduated from high school a year early and attended a small St. Paul college in order to successfully transfer to Princeton the following year. In this brief passage the reader gets a good glimpse of Kirn’s style, tone, and point of the book. It is a self-effacing account of Kirn’s educational experience that demonstrates how a seemingly bright and over-achieving student learned virtually no academic knowledge in a system rigged in favor of the uber-rich and highly connected. He writes, “In imitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Minnesota’s most famous writer and author of The Great Gatsby, the only serious work of literature that I managed to finish as a teenager, I wanted to go East.” He later writes that the tragic and cautionary message of Gatsby was lost on him; he read it merely as a “chronicle of several high-spirited Midwesterners storming through the mansions of the East.”

So how did Kirn get to Princeton with only a modicum of academic content knowledge? Through memorization and mimicry. There are several instances in the book where the author describes how he would read and memorize dictionaries and thesauruses, so that he could master the analogies section of the SAT, and so that he could impress teachers with a deep vocabulary in order to hide his lack of knowledge and intellectual creativity. Kirn writes: “A natural-born child of the meritocracy, I’d been amassing momentum my whole life, entering spelling bees, vying for forensics medals, running my mouth in mock United Nations, and I knew only one direction: forward. I lived for prizes, plaques, citations, stars, and I gave no thought to any goal beyond my next appearance on the honor roll. Learning was secondary, promotion was primary. No one ever told me what the point was, except to keep on accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient.”

In high school Kirn was able to accumulate those points mostly through the sheer weight of his vocabulary and a set of memorized facts from almanacs. But he also rose through the ranks in k-12 through a technique that would take different forms: pleasing the teachers. For his earliest teachers this took the form of “thoughtful” gestures of helpfulness like offering to help clean and tidy the classroom. But later he realized that pleasing teachers takes other forms as well. In 5th grade Kirn gave a compliment during a private conversation with a hippie music teacher he admired and had a crush on. From this conversation Kirn “learned something important – not about music, about teachers. They were people. Lonely people, often, who weren’t really free to share their lives with us but longed for appreciation, just as I did. And why not give it to them now and then? Maybe they would give it back to me.”

At Princeton, this “pleasing of teachers” took the form of mimicry, borrowing, and feigning knowledge and support for the latest academic and intellectual fads. In one of the more humorous moments of the book Kirn describes how he became one of the leading “decostructionalists” in the English Department’s undergraduate honors program. He assumed the courses would be “a study of the classics and analyses of the major themes and such”. Instead, he was taken aback to find that the professors regarded the classics as trivial and “beneath discussion.” Kirn continues, “We were buffeted by ‘theory’, whatever that was… What mattered, we were given to understand, were our ‘critical assumptions’.”

Kirn claims he didn’t understand the use of “theory” to interrogate his “critical assumptions”, but that he would survive by pleasing his professors by relying on skills he had acquired on the high school speech team, skills that relied on “mimicking authority figures and playing back to them their own ideas as if they were conclusions I had reached myself.” Kirn then writes a passage that might give pause to anyone who is concerned with real education in America, to anyone who is worried that our education system is actually built around teaching kids the correct answers instead of teaching them to ask the right questions: “To me, imitation and education were words for the same thing. What was learning but a form of borrowing? And what was intelligence but borrowing slyly?”

I found Kirn’s description of how he negotiated his way through being a “deconstructionist of literature that I never constructed in the first place” to be quiet humorous; it’s worth quoting at length: “The deployment of key words was crucial, just as recognition of them had been on the SAT. Because I despaired of ever grasping these theory words, style and presentation was everything. ‘Liminal’, spoken breezily enough, and ‘valuational’, served up with verve, could make a professor shiver and drop his chalk, but if delivered hesitantly, they bombed. Unless they were spit out promptly and with spirit, such words could actually choke a person. This suffocating sensation often came over me whenever I opened Deconstruction and Criticism, a collection of essays of theory people that I spotted everywhere that year and knew to be one of the richest sources around for words that could turn a modest essay into an A-plus tour de force. Here is a sentence (or what I took to be one because it ended with a period) from the contribution of Jaques Derrida: ‘He speaks his mother tongue as the language of the other and deprives himself of all reappropriation, all specularization in it.’ On the same page I encountered the windpipe-blocking ‘heternomous’ and ‘invagination.’ When I turned the page I came across – stuck in a footnote – the word ‘unreadibility.’ That word I understood, of course. But real understanding was rare with theory.”

For Kirn, he simply understood all these hard theory words to be just that: “hard.” As I reflect on my own time as a graduate student, Kirn’s summation in this passage resonated with me. “I wasn’t one of theory’s true believers,” Kirn continues, “I was a confused opportunist trying to turn confusion to his advantage by sucking up to scholars of confusion.” I suspect that is how graduate students become indoctrinated into the orthodoxy of the academy.

Kirn’s description of his time at Princeton is almost depressing with its over-the-top self-effacing and sardonic tone. Kirn seems pathetic as he struggles to fit in and is put-off by the rigid social order. Additionally, he finds many of his classmates to be frauds while at the same time recognizing internally that he is the biggest fraud on campus. At times, he sounds like a 1980s version of Holden Caufield with a drug and alcohol problem. Halfway through his sophomore year Kirn destroys the property of his rich dorm mates for justice against their snobby treatment of him. By his senior year, Kirn is penniless, virtually friendless, and experiences a nervous breakdown.

Despite all his travails, Kirn manages to become a finalist for a Rhodes Scholarship. It is in the final 25 pages where he describes his Rhodes interviews and his final days at Princeton that I had several laugh-out-loud moments. For instance, Kirn recognizes it is absurd to think he is “Rhodes material”, especially compared to his classmates who had applied. Kirn explains that they all had a “conspicuous campus presence, top athletes and leaders of student government, whereas I was an addled loner in an old raincoat … I was also an unindicted vandal, a suspected offender against the Honor Code, a phony theory devotee, and a chain-smoking post-aphasic whose only bulwark against regression was a heavily underlined thesaurus. Still, I felt I had an outside shot. I’d learned by then that the masters of advancement use a rough quota system in their work, reserving a certain number of wild-card slots for overreaching oddballs.”

Of course, Kirn does not get the Rhodes Scholarship, but the subsequent climax is a nice exclamation point on the whole book, which suggests that the first step toward intellectual fulfillment has nothing to do with the fast-paced and highly competitive educational system we have. Kirn tells us that “percentile is destiny in America”, and David Labaree, the educational historian, demonstrates this axiom in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning. After all, Labaree points out and Kirn’s experience supports, our American system does not reward real knowledge or creativity; it rewards those who play the game and see their grade-point-averages as a means to a credential that can be used on the open market.
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Oct 29, 2009 Terry rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: education, memoir, non-fiction

Eh. On a personal level, I did enjoy this intellectual autobiography, but for purely situational reasons, since I'm currently constantly musing about education and class and what it means to be well educated and all that stuff.

And again, personally, I was by turns bemused and annoyed by Kirn... or maybe Kirn's TONE, his STYLE, not Kirn himself, I should say. I am a rabid fan of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and I think anyone who enjoyed that book as a story of aspiration might enjoy Kirn's...more Eh. On a personal level, I did enjoy this intellectual autobiography, but for purely situational reasons, since I'm currently constantly musing about education and class and what it means to be well educated and all that stuff.

And again, personally, I was by turns bemused and annoyed by Kirn... or maybe Kirn's TONE, his STYLE, not Kirn himself, I should say. I am a rabid fan of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and I think anyone who enjoyed that book as a story of aspiration might enjoy Kirn's work, as I did in that way.

On the other hand, the book also reminded me of the few MFA graduates I know, most of whom have said they regretted getting the degree, for various reasons. Well, fine, I think to myself, but you still HAVE an MFA. It's like winning the lottery and then saying "Eh, a million dollars isn't all it's cracked up to be." WELL, HOW NICE. Kirn is a graduate of Princeton and won a substantial fellowship to study in England, and his shrugging "eh, Princeton" and "I'm just a country boy at heart" and "oh those rich people are a world unto themselves"--coming from someone of Kirn's present stature, they ring a little false.

On a critical level... I'm not really sure what the point of the book is, or who is its intended audience. Kirn is quite critical of the sons-and-daughters-of-the-masters-of-the-universe he met at Princeton, who are probably the same ones who make up his current audience, so... And he probably wouldn't have gotten the fellowship he speaks so lovingly of if he hadn't gone to Princeton in the first place, so the majority of the book that criticizes the student body (and the "point" or raison d'etre of places like Princeton itself) feels kind of, well, false, really.

I mean, it could be read as a coming-of-age story where he DOES end up finding his "tribe" before he leaves Princeton, and that's the part that matters, or might be his intended message. But he weights the book much more heavily toward "these people are JERKS" than toward "don't worry, freaks of the world lost on Ivy League campuses--you will find your tribe!" so that argument doesn't really hold water. (less)

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May 06, 2012 Caitlin rated it 3 of 5 stars

I borrowed this for some light reading on a plane from a fellow Goodreader. This is probably more of a 3.5 star review. I would say I liked this piece and recommend it.

This is one of those cover designs/titles that, I thought, suggested a much different kind of book within than what I encountered. This is a memoir, and although it is concerned intimately with the highest echelons of education in this country, it is much less about meritocracy than the title would have you believe. Even so, the f...more I borrowed this for some light reading on a plane from a fellow Goodreader. This is probably more of a 3.5 star review. I would say I liked this piece and recommend it.

This is one of those cover designs/titles that, I thought, suggested a much different kind of book within than what I encountered. This is a memoir, and although it is concerned intimately with the highest echelons of education in this country, it is much less about meritocracy than the title would have you believe. Even so, the first two or four chapters are uncomfortably familiar for me. The author reflects on being the kind of elementary school student who wanted to be the one teachers called on when a correct answer was needed. He talks about the pressure to win spelling bees (I remember both those and science fairs) and to focus on standardized testing.

This is by no means a comprehensive evaluation of the pressure many students face. Moreover, once the story really gets going, I think it's more an indictment of college than it is of meritocracy. The author never manages to figure out what he wants to do while he's in school. He poses as a playwright and as a proponent of Critical Theory. There is an uncomfortable truth in the way he talks about using a certain kind of vocabulary to fool people into buying your take in a Theory environment.

I'm not insensible about this--remember that hoax at the DU Press with Stan Fish? Still, it's as if the author is laughing at us even from his "reformed" place later in life. He still doesn't think academia is worth much. He never seemed to really like books, or reading, or figuring out why we like them. Perhaps the most puzzling thing about the story is that, after four years of middling academic involvement, incredible drug use, and a near-total failure to make any lasting connections to other human beings, the author closes, triumphally, by applying for a fellowship that takes him to Oxford. A fellowship for ne'erdowells with a wine budget.

Maybe I'm most troubled by the fact that the author seems to want to be contrite, but ultimately leaves us feeling like he beat the system. I don't know, exactly. It's generally well-written.(less)

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Jul 03, 2012 Daniel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011, culture

Walter Kirn grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota and hated it. The book begins with him and his Junior classmates in a van on a Saturday morning, all of them travelling to a larger city where the SAT is administered. Kirn scored high, because demonstrating aptitude is a thing for which he has always had aptitude. Aptitude for aptitude’s sake. A man about nothing? This is essentially his conclusion, namely that merit does not guarantee substance and achievement is not the soul’s smithy.

T...more Walter Kirn grew up in a small town in northern Minnesota and hated it. The book begins with him and his Junior classmates in a van on a Saturday morning, all of them travelling to a larger city where the SAT is administered. Kirn scored high, because demonstrating aptitude is a thing for which he has always had aptitude. Aptitude for aptitude’s sake. A man about nothing? This is essentially his conclusion, namely that merit does not guarantee substance and achievement is not the soul’s smithy.

This is a twenty-five-years-later look at what the time between the end of high school and the end of college meant for a successful student who studied at Macalester, Princeton, and then studied abroad after finishing college. He scored so well on the SAT that Macalester said he could matriculate after the end of his Junior year, and of the twenty students accepted into Princeton as transfers in 1980 Kirn was one. The verity of events written about so long after they happened is always suspect, but this account does not breech reasonable credulity. His previous works are novels and at times the dialogue seems contrived like he pulled it from somewhere dark and sphincter-y, but it stays fun anyway given that not much is at stake.

This book stays interesting at the expense of being short and leaving one wanting more by its end—a good mixture of anecdote and arc, recollection and reflection. The general idea presented is that one can do all kinds of things simply by acting them. One does not have to think to recapitulate the literary theory being taught, and as long as one is an apt recapitulator then one can, in Kirn’s case, earn a kind of meaningless respect.

The demonstration of aptitude and the winning of merit points are not all he reflects on over the course of this account. Kirn satisfyingly details how faking it just wasn’t enough towards the end, when he flies back to Minneapolis for the the selection of the two Rhodes scholars who will represent Minnesota, how he felt out of place, how his interview bombed, and how at the end he was okay with the result. Coming of age is often coming to grips with the idea that potential is never unlimited, and that limits are not bad things. By this point Kirn had come to realize that he was not on the same level as the great thinkers and model students of America, and that, while being a bs-er is not always a great thing, it’s not always a bad thing either. After his Rhodes rejection he is told of another less-prestigious scholarship called the Keasbey, described by Kirn as an award that considers the applicant’s brio and panache in addition to their capacity for scholarship. Kirn wins this, and went on to write magazine articles, novels, and he now lives in Montana—not a bad result to an early life filled with pretension and unfulfilling excellence.

This is a book about finding one’s way in the midst of wealthy people, drugs, dysfunctional relationships, Mormonism, people-pleasing, inner rings, high academics, financial limitations, crazy parents, parental uncles, stoners, the granola, hot exchange students and hicks. At the end of the thesis and antithesis we get a Walter, who is neither a perfect synthesis of nor unaffected by all of his experiences. Aren’t we all?
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Apr 03, 2011 Mark Schnell rated it 4 of 5 stars

I found this a fascinating and absorbing read, and read it pretty much straight through, in one or two sessions over a weekend. I think any high school senior who's just been rejected by the admissions department at Princeton (or Yale or Harvard) would be cheered immensely to read this, to thank his/her lucky stars that he/she narrowly escaped ending up at such a place.

Reviewer Melanie Thernstrom compared this to "Holden Caulfield" at Princeton. That it is very perceptive comment! To me though,...more

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Mar 29, 2010 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

Interesting theme of his "aptitude" for standardized test-taking propelling him up a ladder of competition at the expense of any questioning/reflection about where the ladder was leading and whether it was somewhere he wanted to go.

Much of the focus is on his time as an English major and theater/arts-scene hanger-on at Princeton.

Some of the enjoyment I got from the book was a matter of shared experience ("hey, my grade school had those 'SRA' color-coded cards too, and the competitive kids woul...more

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Oct 11, 2009 Kjes rated it 2 of 5 stars

This is one arrogant, conceited person. After a couple hundred pages portraying how intellectually superior he is (albeit misguided), he makes his point, concretely, on the last page. A good point, and I know he was making the point all along, but what a drag getting there.

One paragraph does stand out on page 23: "My psychiatrist, who'd encouraged these reminiscences and patiently listened ot them for several sessions, fanning my hopes for a conclusive insight into my conflicted character, ended...more

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Jun 14, 2009 Christiane rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: startedbutnotfinished

Perhaps if I were to read the second half of this book, I might glean some insights from the story, but it just made me too mad to finish. I can't quite figure out why it makes me angry, but it does. The passage about having a three-way with two beautiful girls in high school made it seem like the experience was his just reward for graduating high school in his junior year and going to college a year early. Oh, and the SATs? A piece of fucking cake. It's easy to get into Princeton--just win a co...more

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Jul 11, 2009 nicole rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: uhhhh

Shelves: memoir

The writing in this book is exquisite thus the 4 star review.

However, I truly dislike the narrator.

I think this should be 3.5 stars because I feel like I've been duped. I thought this book would provide a scathing critique of the breed of asshole Kirn himself "was." So, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and tried to believe that he wasn't proud of himself for becoming an expert test-taker with paper-thin knowledge of anything at all.

His tone betrays him as the asshole we all assume that he is....more

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Jul 24, 2009 Brian Ayres rated it 2 of 5 stars

I'm not a big fan of memoirs because of there suspect accuracy. Most people can't remember two weeks ago, let alone when they were four years old. This is the problem with Walter Kirn's memoir on his educational experiences from elementary school through his years at Princeton. Add in the constant drug and alcohol use and Kirn's accounts are probably based on hazes of recollection. I do not disagree with his basic premise that an education system based on timed tests in elementary school and SAT...more

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Jan 18, 2010 Gretchen rated it 2 of 5 stars

The framing chapters don't match the middle of this book. Kirn presents this as an examination of the flaws in an American meritocratic system that unduly rewards strivers over real thinkers, student who excel at multiple-choice tests and figuring out what teachers want, yet who never really learn to pursue in-depth learning for the love of it. With some such critiques of the system myself, I was ready to read the book and learn more. Kirn paints himself as such a striver, always figuring out th...more The framing chapters don't match the middle of this book. Kirn presents this as an examination of the flaws in an American meritocratic system that unduly rewards strivers over real thinkers, student who excel at multiple-choice tests and figuring out what teachers want, yet who never really learn to pursue in-depth learning for the love of it. With some such critiques of the system myself, I was ready to read the book and learn more. Kirn paints himself as such a striver, always figuring out the rules of the academic game and aiming to please. In the opening scene he is the one high-school male on the bus on the way to the SATs who repeatedly refuses the Schnapps, knowing that to play this part of the game he has to be sober.

The middle of the book, however, reads as anything but the story of a student aiming to please. It chronicles the debauchery of a person seemingly bent on self-destruction through drugs, alcohol, and sexual conquests (if one were to believe Krin, every woman student he met at Princeton in the 1980s was looking to indulge her rape fantasies). Indeed, Kirn is now the one stealing the Schnapps for daily drinking sessions in his room.

Casting all the way back to the beginning of his education at age four, the book sounds like the cry of someone still angry at the father who was remote, the sixth-grade teacher who sexually molested him and his classmates, and the college roommates who rubbed their wealth and connections in his face and made him miserable. That's one kind of book, and it's a legitimate one (though by the time he cut the strings on his roommates' piano and smashed their television, I was bored and disgusted).

But it's not really a book about striving to curry favor with academic authority. Kirn may have been an unhappy student who felt he was continuously promoted without its ever making him feel sure of himself, but it wasn't because he was one of the students working to game the system. Indeed, neither excelling at multiple choice tests nor learning the vocabulary of deconstructionsts makes one a Rhodes finalist. Kirn obviously had some very real raw intellectual talent and serious interests in writing that he does his best in this book to subvert, insisting they weren't anything and that he was one of the fakers. I don't buy it. If he wanted to write a book about being deeply unhappy and self-destructive as a student, that's fine. But don't couch it as a book about the American testing system. There are enough other versions of that story that are actually on point.(less)

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Apr 21, 2012 Matt rated it 3 of 5 stars

Three stars is probably a bit generous, but I enjoyed the very end of the memoir, where Kirn gives his final verdict on the Princeton experience, so the book gets a half-star bonus.

Outside of the last few chapters, this read like a veiled attempt for Kirn to brag about all the women he slept with and all the drugs he did when he was younger. There was nothing resembling a narrative thread, and there wasn't really any rhyme or reason for what anecdotes were included, except that he seemed to inc...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Heidi Thorsen added it

I thought the book would be an indictment of the system, but instead it seems to me an indictment of the author. I found it to be an engaging memoir, and a quick read. But it's not so much a coming-of-age tale as a description of how the author did NOT come of age and find himself, although his self-discovery is alluded to at the end of the book (it presumably takes place at a future point in his life not covered by this book).

Because the character (the author) doesn't really evolve much during...more

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Mar 20, 2011 Gabrielle rated it 2 of 5 stars

This memoir was a decent read, but I was somewhat disappointed. The author did extremely well on his SATs and had the opportunity to attend Princeton. Instead of putting forth effort and taking advantage of his opportunities, he tried to "outsmart" the system. He did just enough work in order to appear intellectual. Throughout his life, he was able to memorize and repeat what his teachers wanted him to. I expected him to discuss the problems this presents in life, but he spent most of the book w...more

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Apr 22, 2010 Lia rated it 2 of 5 stars

Kirn taught at UChicago for a quarter, so I was interested to read his latest book about his underwhelming education (or non-education) both before and at Princeton. Unfortunately, Kirn's writing is also underwhelming. While some of his reflections about education are interesting, and dead-on (Kirn observes that all he had to do to get an A in an English class at college was to insert words he and most people didn't understand), in the end, his writing suffers from the same problems he suffered...more

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Feb 24, 2010 heather rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

i hate to say this, but i could really relate to the events in this book. beyond that, i love kirn's terse writing style, which not only mocks his surroundings but skewers himself at this point in his life. while the book does focus on the Princeton/Ivy League/East Coast elite, i think his out-of-place(ness) (there is a German word for this, i'm sure) is something many of us can identify with, at the age he writes about and in different locations. in kirn's surroundings, the effect is magnified,...more

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Jun 29, 2009 matt rated it 2 of 5 stars

Proving once again the power of the Colbert bump (though I’m not sure it counts if an item is taken out from a library), I was intrigued by Kirn’s appearance/dismissal of the university system. Riding the same wave of (faux) populist outrage that has swept the country, nothing seems more topical and appropriate than a backlash against the hallowed halls of academia, particularly those stuffed shirts over at the Ivys You’ll get what’s coming to you, nerds!
This tacked with all of the attention th...more Proving once again the power of the Colbert bump (though I’m not sure it counts if an item is taken out from a library), I was intrigued by Kirn’s appearance/dismissal of the university system. Riding the same wave of (faux) populist outrage that has swept the country, nothing seems more topical and appropriate than a backlash against the hallowed halls of academia, particularly those stuffed shirts over at the Ivys You’ll get what’s coming to you, nerds!
This tacked with all of the attention that Matthew Crawford, Phd turned motorcycle mechanic, has been receiving made this read as good as time as any to transform my high-minded academic pursuits into crippling self-doubt. While Crawford's stance seems more romantic if not a tad conservative (and misogynistic if we are to believe the New Yorker's critique), Kirn provides nothing but anecdotal evidence about how hard it was for him to be a poor kid at Princeton. To be pithy: boo-fucking-hoo.
I'm not exactly sure what number crunching I was expecting of Kirn in his railing against the meriotcracy but all this book contains are not very amusing tales of embarrassment by someone who lacks any sense of self-awareness of his unbelievable privilege and intellectual gifts. Could Kirn really be so solipsistic and naïve to think that just anyone could achieve what he has? Unpack some of that white guilt, my friend.
By cynically categorizing his classmates, he whines about not being able to fit in and faking his way through papers by inserting buzz words like "hegemony" into his papers. Newsflash: nightmare clichés exist in every college. Instead of focusing on the rigidity and questionable motives of institutionalized learning, Kirn gives "ain't I a stinker" stories about how he aped Eugene Ionesco to write bullshit plays that resemble “Dr. Strangelove” which he swore he never saw. Bravo.
Case in point: Kirn refers to the Joy Division lot throughout the book, a pejorative descriptor for the art damaged "underground" kids who he deemed were full of shit. Fair enough, plenty of those exist. In his description, he states that he fakes an interest in Joy Division saying that no one could possibly enjoy them or Public Image. If Kirn was such an astute master of mimicry that he professes, he probably would have known that the name of the band is Public Image Limited.
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Aug 15, 2009 Chuck rated it 2 of 5 stars

Was it back the 1960s when you could get into a prestigious university with a so-so high school record and high SAT scores, and then bluff, drug, and sex your way successfully through the next four years and into a British postgraduate fellowship by relying on raw intelligence coupled with the ability to parrot back to professors just what they want to hear? Well, not exactly, since universities in the '60s still gave out a lot of Cs for average work. Fast-forward to the 1980s, however, and the...more Was it back the 1960s when you could get into a prestigious university with a so-so high school record and high SAT scores, and then bluff, drug, and sex your way successfully through the next four years and into a British postgraduate fellowship by relying on raw intelligence coupled with the ability to parrot back to professors just what they want to hear? Well, not exactly, since universities in the '60s still gave out a lot of Cs for average work. Fast-forward to the 1980s, however, and the scenario becomes reality if Walter Kirn's memoir is to be believed. Master the jargon of postmodernism, and you're home free as an English major at Princeton. (Kirn's story gains some plausibility in light of the infamous Alan Sokal hoax).

Kirn is a fairly engaging writer, and he spins out some good scenes, but his drug stuff doesn't trump Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, and his orgiastic college material doesn't trump Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons. Moreover, it's difficult to figure out Kirn's take on himself. He's obviously belittling the establishment for tolerating his (former?) ilk, but it's not clear whether his meta-self finds his collegiate self to be clever or reprehensible. Kirn's long-overdue flash of academic enlightenment on the book's final page doesn't exactly add up to redemption. More telling is his adulatory barroom encounter in Chapter 7 with a Princeton faculty member ("Julian"*) who "taught psychology . . . despite having no diploma in the subject, only a book he'd written as an amateur". Ironically, Kirn manages to mock academic pretension while at the same time celebrating charlatans. Unfortunately, he fails to acknowledge that every clever impostor who makes it into the mainstream displaces someone earnest and talented who doesn't.

If you have time on your hands, Kirn is a quick read, but for a much more compelling loser-to-success perspective (minus the cynicism about those who succeed) I recommend the works of Tobias Wolff.

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*Although unidentified by Kirn, the individual in question is surely Julian Jaynes, author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.(less)

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Aug 01, 2009 Hollie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Walter Kirn's memoir -- a must read for anyone who ever harbored aspirations of Ivy League grandeur that didn't materialize. Recently he gave a reading from this book at Tin House ending with the appeal, "Don't go to Princeton!" He was a Minnesota misfit who, via outstanding SAT scores found himself desperately seeking to find himself among crowds he defines in his book as "Those Who'd Been on Sailboats" (rich snobs), "Those Who Strove to Serve Mankind" (government-bound), "Those Who Never Raise...more

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Jan 01, 2012 Perelandra rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: autobiography, education, memoir, nonfiction, garbage, read-in-2012

I wasn't interested much by this memoir. I felt as if it would be more about the specifics of the author's Ivy League education and why or why not it was a sham. Instead, I got a drawn out life history full of cynicism that wasn't suited well to my taste and that isn't the author's fault. It is rather depressing, but I was left feeling that this book asks the question "What does it all matter, anyway?" This is the question also asked by the wisest man in the world in the book of Ecclesiastes. It...more

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Aug 28, 2009 Mythili rated it 2 of 5 stars

From his earliest school days, Walter Kirn is driven to succeed – to impress his instructors, out-accomplish his peers, earn top grades, and win contests. “Percentile is destiny in America,” he learns at an early age. But to what end? “No one ever told me what the point was, except to keep accumulating points, and this struck me as sufficient. What else was there?” he muses. By the time Kirn is midway through his undergraduate career at Princeton University, however, questions of “what else?” –...more

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Jul 09, 2011 Khaya rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoirs

I was hoping for an interesting and well thought-out attack on university education. Instead, I got the ramblings of a guy who seems to want to prove his Princeton education was overrated by recounting multiple episodes of drug use, casual sex, and general debauchery while he was there, culminating in...a scholarship to Oxford. Well, clearly Kirn is a rather inaccurate reporter (don't tell me he spent his years at Princeton in a drug-induced haze and just happened to land this major scholarship)...more

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Dec 18, 2009 Adrian added it

Peculiar book. Kirn's story of his years in the American education system from grade school and college in Minnesota to University at Princeton. He learned how to succeed by faking knowledge. Much of the time he comes across as a jerk too lazy to make an effort. Who is to say if his 'cerebral collapse' at Princeton was anything more than too many drugs and too little solid food. Even the celebrated wit is a bit of a stretch. I got a few laughs early on but quickly fell into deep puzzlement at wh...more

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Oct 22, 2011 Ken rated it 3 of 5 stars

An extremely bright guy tells of his adventures at Princeton during the 80's. By the end, he realizes that there is a difference between "acting smart", and really "understanding". The book was well written, but Kirin comes off at times just a tad too smug. One can certainly see how the character in UP IN THE AIR came to be. The very meticulous, isolated brainiac who literally has his head in the clouds is very much a salient part of Kirin's character. For a slim book it worked, but any longer,...more

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Jun 28, 2009 Mika Cantrell rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir

My feelings about this book are mixed. On the one hand, I get Kirn's struggle in the educational system. I was another one to whom the next academic prize was always the next goal. I didn't stop to ask what the point of getting an education was beyond the elusive "get an education so you can get a 'good job.'" When I got dumped out at the end of the ride, there was that moment of panic -- what do you do next?

The other hand, I find Kirn's repeated passages on his debauchery and drug use tiresome...more

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Jul 22, 2011 Rebecca rated it 2 of 5 stars

I rarely like man memoirs and this was not one of them. Bring on Hornsby! This book was all, oh, boo hoo I am so smart and my parents are so weird and everything sucks (in the 70's and 80's). God, kill me now. Luckily, I jammed through this book quickly as well because WHO THE HELL CARES! The author talked about his high school years and then going off to Princeton and it not being what he thought he would be (are Ivy's ever?) and what he got out of the whole thing. Obviously a cushy writing car...more

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Dec 01, 2012 Mike rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone

Although I’ve never read an article or book by the author previously, I know why "Lost in the Meritocracy" is in my TBR list. Someone whose taste in and judgment of literature I respect added it and after glancing at the synopsis I did, also.

It is clear that Walter Kirn is an excellent writer. He is articulate, literate, and can form a decent narrative. Although I understand that many people read and analyze this book to seek deeper insight into the American Education System, American Class Boun...more Although I’ve never read an article or book by the author previously, I know why "Lost in the Meritocracy" is in my TBR list. Someone whose taste in and judgment of literature I respect added it and after glancing at the synopsis I did, also.

It is clear that Walter Kirn is an excellent writer. He is articulate, literate, and can form a decent narrative. Although I understand that many people read and analyze this book to seek deeper insight into the American Education System, American Class Boundaries and the nature of Elitism and the Elite themselves, I did not. I read it for the usual reason: did the writer create something that held my interest.

The short answer is “yes”. His “memoirs” of growing up and moving through schools and into collegiate life are a good story. Maybe not what one would consider attention-grabbing fiction, but then this is not fiction. In this slim volume, the author exposes those incidents that he uses to illustrate his thesis: it is not an encyclopedic history of his life.

The longer answer is “sort of”. Even though I said that I read it for “reading” I also ran my own, semi-conscious analysis of his actions and achievements. Mr. Kirn is someone who everyone agreed had “high potential” from his early years on. Did he live up to that potential? If his life ended before the last two chapters, one would have to say “no”. If you include those, then it becomes more of a “maybe, maybe not”. (I am basing this solely on what is presented in this book. I still do not know anything more about the man.)

His “epiphany”, if you will, comes just before he will be heading off to Oxford University. Has he risen above the hollow sham of his “formative” and college (i.e. Princeton) days or is it something else? That’s an area where one could take almost any position. I have my interpretation, you have yours.

Did exposure to his “betters” (i.e. those who are the natural attendees of an Ivy League school) make the author a better man, a better writer? (I mean in the long-term sense, not while he was there.) Probably not. From his own words it was his Pakistani friend that provide him with the most intellectual stimulation of his last 2 years there (even though he himself was still spouting, his friend was seriously engaged in these topics and discussions.) But it did give him the realization that there was nothing beyond for him, unless he created it himself. What does a grifter do when everyone is an honest man? When the games run out, wither the “gamer”?

There’s a lot that is right and wrong about the American Educational System. There have been people clever enough to fool others since time began. Many people have “high potential” but for one reason or another never live up to that promise. Mr. Kirn is not alone even in his apparent recovery to prominence. While I did not have any preconceived notions when I began this book, I probably would not recommend it to some one who only wants to use it for social and political material. On the other hand, it was well-written enough that I am tempted to read more by the author. I think his fiction will be up in the 95th percentile. Three (3) solid stars.
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Feb 26, 2010 Robert Ludlow rated it 2 of 5 stars

A somewhat diverting, but otherwise disappointing autobiography of the author's education up through undergraduate study at Princeton. We don't spend much time with anyone but the narrator. This would be fine, except that there is really only one source of conflict and we are immediately, and explicitly told of it. His "product of the system," buzzword-tossing approach to education is afterward shown to us repeatedly throughout the rest of the story in glib anecdotes that seem to have no lasting...more

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Feb 15, 2010 Christopher rated it 4 of 5 stars

A fascinating look into small-town Minnesota native, Walter Kirn, and his very random journey through the academic culture of the early 1980s. From his matriculation at Princeton with the adventures and misadventures that inevitably ensue to his tapping for a Keasbey Fellowship at Oxford, Kirn paints a vivid (sometimes too vivid for this Walter Kirn contemporary) portrait of the many positive and negative societal, cultural, and internal forces that collide in creating one's intellectual self.

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Dec 14, 2009 Motorcycle rated it 3 of 5 stars

I liked the idea of the book better than the book itself. I really, really liked Kirn's writing. But I wanted more discussion of the premise of the book than descriptions of the drugs he did and the girls he had sex with. Also the resolution of him starting his real education, taking his reading seriously, was pretty anemic. I really thought there was going to be more of that. It ended so abruptly on that note that I became confused and looked for a following page that wasn't there.

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About Walter Kirn

Walter Kirn is a regular reviewer for The New York Times Book Review, and his work appears in The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Time, New York, GQ and Esquire. He is the author of six previous works of fiction: My Hard Bargain: Stories, She Needed Me, Thumbsucker, Up in the Air, Mission to America and The Unbinding. Kirn is a graduate of Princeton University and attended Oxford on...more

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“Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.” — 3 people liked it

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