Lost in the Meritocracy (v5)

✍ Scribed by Kirn, Walter

• Book ID: 108375818
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 187 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780385529266

✦ Synopsis

Calling something “irreducible.” Searching for a contest, no matter how trifling, that he’ll be sure to win. These are just two of the tricks Kirn used to shuttle himself through high school, Princeton, and on to Oxford, and such soulless maneuvers are what frame this memoir of duping the educational system. Even as a child, Kirn quickly learned that school was not about learning; it was about reciting the code words teachers most wanted to hear—a salient fact that will ring painfully (and shamefully) true to A-students everywhere. This pandering is most acidly portrayed as eight-year-old Kirn reacts to a teacher’s declaration that art isn’t about drawing dinosaurs, it’s about “emotion”—leading Kirn to draw a bunch of squiggly lines around his triceratops to indicate “feelings.” Kirn sprinkles his otherwise finely honed thesis with more typically memoir-ish recollections, which range from meandering to brilliant, but most of the book plays like a mirror-angle Catcher in the Rye, this time from the point of view of one of Holden’s dreaded phonies. --Daniel Kraus

“A funny, self-mocking memoir about how persistently Mr. Kirn went astray. . . . Great fun.” —_The New York Times

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