Monday, May 18, 2009

New Princeton Tell-All




Walter Kirn, author of novel-turned movie Thumbsucker, just came out with a book called Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever . It's supposed to be a memoir about the strangeness of the American education system, but it mostly focuses on Princeton. Its publishers are promoting it this way:
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.
I think things are different now and it should be interesting to compare. The book comes out tomorrow. Expect a review soon!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here's Janet Maslin's review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/books/18masl.html?hpw

AC said...

Things are different now!?

Anonymous said...

He's on Colbert now.

Anonymous said...

That's what Princeton was like when I was there in the mid-90s...universities are a joke. Professors even more so.