Application Adventure: A Dad’s College Essay - "Crazy U"

[groovedaddy]

Asked to come up with a mock title for a surefire best seller, the legendary publisher Bennett Cerf (1898-1971) is said to have replied, sticking a finger into the prevailing winds, “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog.”

As far as I know, no one’s come up with a similarly incisive formula for placing an article on The New York Times’s most e-mailed list. But one way to appear there is to have something new — or smart, or furious, or funny — to say about college admissions and their attending agonies. It’s a topic that roils the collective gut.

The admissions process, as Andrew Ferguson puts it in his new book, “Crazy U,” entangles not just our pocketbooks but everything else that, besides world peace and cocktail hour, matters to parents: “our vanities, our social ambitions and class insecurities, and most profoundly our love and hopes for our children.”

Mr. Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, and he’s a valiant guide through this emotional territory. He’s got a big, beating heart, but he tucks it behind a dry prose style that owes a little bit to Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe — to name the first two white-suited writers who come to mind — and also to Dave Barry (who I suspect wears Dockers).

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/books/04book.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28