Kirn, Walter. Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever. (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Kirn’s memoir offers a cautionary tale for those obsessed with achieving external academic rewards. Unlike many of his Princeton classmates who prized wealth and prestige, Kirn admits he saw these as “…trivial by-products of improving one’s statistical scores in the great generational tournament of aptitude. Ranking itself was the essential prize.” Using his intelligence and rhetorical skills, Kirn bluffs his way through college coursework never thinking about what he would do when the race for academic standing ended. Almost miraculously, as his final year at Princeton drew to a close, he was awarded a scholarship from the Keasbey Foundation. In the weeks prior to leaving for Oxford, he developed pneumonia. Confined to bed and bored, he began to read books from his mother’s collection of classical literature—really read, not pretend to read as he had in college. And so, he concludes, began he education.