"A funny, self-mocking memoir about how persistently Mr. Kirn went astray. . . . Great fun." --
The New York Times
"The witty, self-castigating story of the author's single-minded quest to succeed at a series of tests and competitions that took him from one of the lowest-ranked high schools in Minnesota to Princeton." --
The New York Times Book Review
"Very few people could get away with complaining about attending Princeton University, but Walter Kirn does. . . . Darkly hilarious." --
The Plain Dealer "Scathing and funny. . . . Too delicious." --
Newsweek "Hilarious. . . . Kirn recounts the many ways that the America educational rat race betrayed him." --
The Washington Post Book World
"Tough, funny, and moving. . . . What's such great fun about the book is the intense good humor with which he looks back, and the wonderful portraits he provides of the side characters in his life. . . . There's a kind of joyous cackle behind these colorful scenes, and a sadness, too, both finally giving way to a clean-edged wisdom that infiltrates his story as he leads us toward his moral awakening." --
O, The Oprah Magazine "Tartly funny." --
Newsday "The revelation that skating on the surface of knowledge might kill him if he didn't cut it out was Kirn's alone, but its impact registers far and wide." --
Elle "A diverting memoir that has less to do with grades and standardized test scores than with a Mormon-raised farm boy's difficulty adjusting to the temptations and prejudices of an Ivy League school." --
The Miami Herald "A smart, ambitious writer. . . . Kirn's sentences would be a delight even if they were empty. That they address a serious subject--the Ivy League training that is less about learning than about preparing its beneficiaries to join the ruling class--seems like a bonus." --
Bloomberg News "A fine narrative of what it is to be young, lost, deeply immersed in drugs, and frequently on the verge of a nervous breakdown." --
Bookslut
"Kirn shows, better than any recent book, how our educational system is perverted from beginning to end. . . . Kirn's is one idealist's stirring recollection of what it took to awaken himself from the sloth imposed by the Ivy League's bureaucratic-meritocracy." --
The Daily Beast
"Our only wish was for more." --
McSweeney's