Looking for Class: Seeking Wisdom and Romance at Oxford and Cambridge - Hardcover

Feiler, Bruce

3.42

207 ratings by Goodreads

9780679414926: Looking for Class: Seeking Wisdom and Romance at Oxford and Cambridge

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679414924 ISBN 13: 9780679414926

Publisher: Random House, 1993

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Oxford and Cambridge are two of the most fabled academic institutions in the world; graduates include John Milton and Lord Byron, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and, more recently, President Bill Clinton. For eight centuries, students have journeyed to Oxbridge to drink in the nectar of the classics and train in the sports of the Greeks. Then, in 1990, American writer Bruce Feiler arrived...
Looking for Class is a hilarious and enlightening account of a year at Oxford and Cambridge by a talented young writer who won wide acclaim for his first book, Learning to Bow, an educational odyssey set in Japan. For his new adventure abroad, Feiler lived as a graduate student at Cambridge. He has written this comic expose with the dry wit of a British novelist and the irreverence of an American journalist. The result is a bawdy and illuminating pageant of British life, a cross between P. G. Wodehouse and P. J. O'Rourke, Brideshead Revisited and Animal House.
Feiler shows us Oxbridge from all angles - the garden parties and formal balls, high-minded dormitory debates and late-night drinking Olympics, stuffy tutorials and weeklong exams. Along the way, he matches wits with the quickest tongue in the school during an "English-style" debate; rows in Cambridge's most exclusive athletic ritual; and learns lessons in love from a Rhodes Scholar.
At a time when America's meritocracy is draping itself in the fine cloth of elite British education, Bruce Feiler has ventured into the dark and dusty halls of Anglo academia and demystified British education. What he has discovered is entertaining, informative, and highly relevant to our own educational system. Bruce Feiler is one of the most promising young writers at work today. With remarkable insight, he penetrates Oxford and Cambridge, a world romanticized but rarely seen.

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From Kirkus Reviews:

An agreeable account of a year spent studying at Cambridge and Oxford. Feiler, after graduating from Yale and teaching for a year in a rural Japanese school (described in his Learning to Bow, 1991), pursued graduate studies at Cambridge. He arrived in 1990 with stars in his eyes; memories of Milton, Byron, Newton, and Darwin; and an eagerness ``to row, to debate at the Union, and to have a date for the ball.'' Feiler achieved all three goals--``but by then my stars had already faded.'' He found a Cambridge still ``trapped by its past''; a student body overwhelmingly content, disinclined to demonstrate, and looking for its place in the Establishment--a complacency perhaps arising from the fact that Cambridge is ``a laboratory of love'' where students are ``virtually bombarded with occasions to drink and excuses to get pissed.'' In the course of his social rounds, the author met and fell in love with a Canadian Rhodes Scholar from Oxford who eventually threw him over because, she said, he wasn't an original thinker. She might have reconsidered if she'd been able to read Feiler's analysis here of the similarities between the Japanese and the British: Both, he notes, inhabit isolated islands of roughly the same size and roughly the same weather; both boast largely homogenous peoples and unifying national religions; both speak languages characterized by a similar emphasis on courtesy, hierarchy, and indirection; and both display a powerful national pride verging on xenophobia. Feiler believes that the two nations' educational systems largely explain their different fortunes in this century, with Britain suffering from an antibusiness bias (fewer than eight percent of Oxbridge graduates go into industry, compared to two-thirds of Japanese college grads) and a hierarchy of intellectual values that stresses the abstract and philosophical while regarding the practical almost with contempt. A delightfully witty complement to Ved Mehta's Up at Oxford (p. 841), full of anecdotes and food for thought. -- Copyright �1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Library Journal:

The intimate look at foreign education begun by Feiler in his Learning To Bow: Inside the Heart of Japan ( LJ 8/91) is here focused on those romanticized paragons of academia: Oxford and Cambridge. He tells of his stint (1990-91) as a graduate student in international relations at Cambridge and his romantic interest in an American Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Feiler's wit and humor shine through as he relates his encounters with academic protocols, bedders, porters, rowing, alcohol consumption, social gatherings, tutorials, debates, adjustments to the Queen's English (almost a foreign tongue, he claims), sharking, and interpersonal relationships as a "colonist." He concludes by pointing out affinities between Japanese and British education and cultures while citing the differences with the American modus operandi. Recommended for libraries serving those interested in international education.
- Scott Johnson, Meridian Community Coll. Lib., Miss.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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