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"  Novelist and essayist Walter Kirn is one of our sharpest, cuttingest social critics. But\u2014wow!\u2014does he do a number on himself and the many educators who failed him (and, he implies, fail many other wayward if promising young souls) in his new memoir, Lost in the Merito\u00ADcracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever \u00AD(Doubleday). Kirn traces his path from a Minnesota town so twee that it &amp;quot;belonged on a cake plate&amp;quot; to the &amp;quot;neo-\u00ADGothic shadowland&amp;quot; of Princeton. In grade school, he learned that he could win &amp;quot;prizes, plaques, citations, stars&amp;quot; by flaunting his &amp;quot;dazzling flash-card-based vocabulary.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s shocking that not one teacher called him on his cheap sophistry along the way; sadly, it&amp;#039;s less \u00ADsurprising that Kirn, who excelled as a Mormon teen speaker (mostly for the petting sessions it earned him afterward in the church parking lot), glided through \u00ADcollege relying on the same trick. He had scarcely read anything beyond The Exorcist\u2014but in the theory-crazy &amp;#039;80s, he grasped the advantage of flicking fuzzy words like \u00ADspecularization into the A+ papers he wrote &amp;quot;decon-structing a body of literary knowledge&amp;quot; he had &amp;quot;never constructed in the first place.&amp;quot; Kirn hung with a darkly artsy college clique, met some serious creeps (one &amp;quot;descendant of a legendary industrialist&amp;quot; drove him blindfolded into the countryside one night, then shouted, &amp;quot;Behold, poor serf!... a power you will never know!&amp;quot; in front of his family&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;actual castle&amp;quot;), and blunted his growing alienation with liquid cocaine. As a junior, Kirn had a breakdown in which, tellingly, he struggled to dredge up the simplest words. Working at a library, he began reading almost at random and spent predawn sessions poring over the dictionary in bed\u2014&amp;quot;my way of showing contrition for squandering my high-percentile promise.&amp;quot; For the first time, he found himself &amp;quot;making measurable strides, however minuscule,&amp;quot; and in the end he managed to earn his Princeton degree fair and square. The revelation that skating on the surface of knowledge might kill him if he didn&amp;#039;t cut it out was Kirn&amp;#039;s alone, but its impact \u00ADregisters far and wide. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a10053/book-release-lost-in-the-meritocracy-324637/>