Excerpt
“Reading Andy Ferguson’s prose is like sipping a martinieven if you don’t happen to drink martinis. His adventures in the college application trenches are hilarious, eye-popping, and instructive, a perfect match of author and subject. A+!”
Christopher Buckley, bestselling author of Losing Mum and Pup and Thank You for Smoking “Alas, by the time our almost-grown children arrive on campus, they will already have been hardened by exposure to the principles of Absurdistan. As a parent, I wish I had read Andrew Ferguson's guide to this world of bloviation, hypocrisy and bureaucracy before I was pitchforked into it myself.”
Christopher Hitchens “Thank God a writer as good as Andrew Ferguson has finally written a book about what I, after two serious bouts of it, call ‘college madness.’ His title Crazy U says it faster and funnier. I’ve heard it called other colorful names but none fit for a book lying around in a high school junior's home.”
Tom Wolfe “It’s Andy Ferguson, so of course this book is meticulously researched, brilliantly written, and funny. But by using his son’s forced march through the anxiety and much of picking and getting into a college, Andy has done a new thing: He has employed poignancy as a tool of critical analysis. As a result, the stuffing is removed from the absurd, fraudulent, parasitic college admissions processand from the absurd, fraudulent, and parasitic colleges themselves.”
P. J. O’Rourke, bestselling author of Don’t Vote It Just Encourages the Bastards “Andrew Ferguson has long been one of the funniest and most observant and beautiful writers. A satirist who can illuminate both the absurdities of life and its deeper meaning, he is the perfect guide to the madness of applying to college. Crazy U is not only a terrific and hysterical bookit may be the only way to keep you sane.”
David Grann, bestselling author of The Lost City of Z “The joy of pride in one’s child, the sadness of separationall this is part of leaving for college, and in Ferguson’s honest,deeply felt, and truthfully recorded memoir it is overlaid with the monstrosity known as the college application process. Rumor, gossip, college hucksterism,and internet bandits rule. Ferguson has written for every hair-rending and stressed parent who has gone through the processor is about to. The book is hilarious, probing, maddening, moving, and gets it right.”
William Bennett, bestselling author of The Book of Virtues “[Ferguson’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…and also to Dave Barry…[Crazy U] is a calm, amusing, low-key meditation on a subject that is anything but calm, amusing or low key.”
Dwight Garner, The New York Times “A hilarious narrative and an incisive guide to the college admissions process… Ferguson cuts through the muddle to elevate the discussion and deliver some powerful big-picture analysis…[his] storytelling is irresistible.”
Steven Livingston, The Washington Post "This is an affectionate, affecting account, and . . . it may help you figure out how to keep your sanity in a process that lacks it entirely."
David M. Schribman, The Boston Globe