Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever »

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 a scholarship from the Keasby Foundation. He lives in Livingston, Montana.

A New York Times Notable Book A Daily Beast Best Book of the Year A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year

From elementary school on, Walter Kirn knew how to stay at the top of his class: He clapped erasers, memorized answer keys, and parroted his teachers’ pet theories. But when he launched himself eastward to an Ivy League university, Kirn discovered that the temple of higher learning he had expected was instead just another arena for more gamesmanship, snobbery, and social climbing. In this whip-smart memoir of kissing-up, cramming, and competition, Lost in the Meritocracy reckons the costs of an educational system where the point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or within. 
 

The Barnes & Noble Review

The best memoirs spin out of the collision of two fronts, the weather that lives inside the writer and the weather in which the writer lives. When an intimate climate bangs against the meteorology of the outer world, the reader is twice elevated.

Among recent memoirs, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, J. R. Moehringer's The Tender Bar, and Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father achieved this expansive duality. Walter Kirn's Lost in the Meritocracy: The Overeducation of an Underachiever doesn't quite make it. As it tracks his strategically manipulated entry into Princeton and the "ruling class" -- all due to his ability to game the system and flatter the gatekeepers -- it occasionally scores high on satire and (suspiciously) triumphant self-abnegation. Kirn knows how to toss off lines like, "I chose to major in English, since it sounded like something I might already know," but he struggles to lash his experience to the larger world with any big -- or even little -- bangs.