Review: Lost in the Meritocracy

Lost in the Meritocracy by Walter Kirn

I’ll be honest—I expected something a little different from Lost in the Meritocracy. I was just expecting a scathing indictment of the soullessness of the American education system buoyed by Kirn’s personal experiences here and there, and I got a memoir instead. Gentle readers, you may recall that I don’t really read memoirs; unless someone I already really like has written it (like Michael Chabon or Tina Fey), I tend to sail by them completely. In fact, I don’t even remember how this recommendation even came to me… In the end, though, I still got what I came for, even if it wasn’t as much as I wanted or in quite the same way as I expected.

The Literary Horizon: Lost in the Meritocracy, Born Round

Memoirs and I don’t exactly get along, as a genre–while I firmly believe that one’s life is a very good story, that doesn’t mean I want to read it apropos of nothing. However, two memoirs have popped up on my radar that do more than just recount a life. They examine the American educational system that can produce successful students with little true learning and one man’s eternal conflict with food.