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Lost in the Meritocracy
Walter Kirn
The Undereducation of an Overachiever
Doubleday
May 2009
On Sale: May 19, 2009
224 pages
ISBN: 0385521286
EAN: 9780385521284
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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-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.
Every American who has spent years of his or her life there
will experience many shocks of recognition while reading
Walter Kirn’s sharp, rueful, and often funny book—and likely
a sense of liberation at its end.
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