Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life

William Deresiewicz. Excellent Sheep (Free Press, 2014).

“Books like this one, volumes that probe the sick soul of American higher education, come and go, more than a few of them hitting the long tail of the best-seller lists. . . . 'Excellent Sheep' is likely to make more of a lasting mark than many of these books, for three reasons. One, Mr. Deresiewicz spent 24 years in the Ivy League, graduating from Columbia and teaching for a decade at Yale. (Yale denied him tenure, leading some to shrug this book off as sour grapes.) He brings the gory details. Two, the author is a striker, to put it in soccer terms. He’s a vivid writer, a literary critic whose headers tend to land in the back corner of the net. Three, his indictment arrives on wheels: He takes aim at just about the entirety of upper-middle-class life in America."
—Dwight Garner, New York Times