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Walter Kirn (Writer)
[1963 - ]
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The Unbinding
(2006)
Before AidSat I had no self, no soul. I was a
billing address. A credit score. I had a TV, a computer, a phone, a car,
an apartment, some furniture, and a health-club locker. Then AidSat hired
me and gave me a life. And not just one life. Hundreds of them, thousands.
Kent Selkirk is an operator at AidSat, an omni-present subscriber service
ready to answer, solve, and assist with the client’s every problem.
Through the AidSat network Kent has a wealth of information at his
fingertips–information he can use to monitor subscribers’ vital signs,
information he can use to track their locations, information he can use to
insinuate himself into their very lives.
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Mission to America:
A Novel
(2005)
Mason LaVerle is a young man on a mission—a mission
to America. He was raised in a remote Montana town in the church of the
Aboriginal Fulfilled Apostles, a matriarchal, not-quite-Christian, almost
New-Ageish sect that, like the Amish, keeps a wary distance from
mainstream life. But the Apostles face a dwindling membership, so Mason is
sent on an outreach mission with another young man to bring back
converts—and, more specifically, brides. And so these two naive believers
head off in a van to encounter the contemporary scene in all its
bewildering, seductive diversity. They proselytize at malls, passing out
leaflets in parking garages based on the condition of their cars and their
bumper stickers. Eventually, they make their way to a gilded Colorado ski
town, where, while promoting their un-American message of humble, serene,
optimistic fatalism, Mason finds himself courting a young woman who used
to pose for Internet porn sites, and his partner becomes the live-in guru
of a guilt-ridden billionaire with chronic bowel complaints. Meanwhile,
back in Montana, the Apostles are facing schism and extinction as their
beloved leader, the Seeress, drifts toward death. The mounting pressures
lead Mason to the brink of missionary madness.
Walter Kirn is one of the most acute observers of contemporary American
life that we have. In Mission to America, he harnesses that gift to
a satirical yet moving tale of a stranger in a strange land that just
happens to be our own.
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Up in the Air
(2001)
Ryan Bingham’s job as a Career Transition
Counselor–he fires people–has kept him airborne for years. Although he has
come to despise his line of work, he has come to love the culture of what
he calls “Airworld,” finding contentment within pressurized cabins,
anonymous hotel rooms, and a wardrobe of wrinkle-free slacks. With a
letter of resignation sitting on his boss’s desk, and the hope of a job
with a mysterious consulting firm, Ryan Bingham is agonizingly close to
his ultimate goal, his Holy Grail: one million frequent flier miles. But
before he achieves this long-desired freedom, conditions begin to
deteriorate.
With perception, wit, and wisdom, Up in the Air combines
brilliant social observation with an acute sense of the psychic costs of
our rootless existence, and confirms Walter Kirn as one of the most savvy
chroniclers of American life.
Movie (2009), Jason Reitman, director with Anna Kendrick, George Clooney,
Jason Bateman, and Vera Farmiga
DVD
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Thumbsucker:
A Novel
(1999)
This eighties-centric, Ritalin-fueled, pitch-perfect
comic novel by a writer to watch brings energy and originality to the
classic Midwestern coming-of-age story.
Meet Justin Cobb, "the King Kong of oral obsessives" (as his dentist dubs
him) and the most appealingly bright and screwed-up fictional adolescent
since Holden Caulfield donned his hunter's cap. For years, no remedy--not
orthodontia, not the escalating threats of his father, Mike, a washed-out
linebacker turned sporting goods entrepreneur, not the noxious cayenne
pepper-based Suk-No-Mor--can cure Justin's thumbsucking habit.
Then a course of hypnosis seemingly does the trick, but true to the
conservation of neurotic energy, the problem doesn't so much disappear as
relocate. Sex, substance abuse, speech team, fly-fishing, honest work,
even Mormonism--Justin throws himself into each pursuit with a hyperactive
energy that even his daily Ritalin dose does little to blunt.
Each time, however, he discovers that there is no escaping the unruly
imperatives of his self and the confines of his deeply eccentric family.
The only "cure" for the adolescent condition is time and distance.
Always funny, sometimes hilariously so, occasionally poignant, and even
disturbing, deeply wise on the vexed subject of fathers and sons, Walter
Kirn's Thumbsucker is an utterly fresh and all-American take on the
painful process of growing up.
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She Needed Me
(1992)
After a meeting outside a St. Paul abortion clinic,
two young people--Kim, pregnant, desperate, broke, and seeking help; and
Weaver, a devout member of a fanatical protest group--fall in love despite
their differences. A first novel.
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever
(2009)
"Percentile is destiny in America.”
So says Walter Kirn, a peerless observer and interpreter of American life,
in this whip-smart memoir of his own long strange trip through American
education. Working his way up the ladder of standardized tests,
extracurricular activities, and class rankings, Kirn launched himself
eastward from his rural Minnesota hometown to the ivy-covered campus of
Princeton University. There he found himself not in a temple of higher
learning so much as an arena for gamesmanship, snobbery, social climbing,
ass-kissing, and recreational drug use, where the point of literature
classes was to mirror the instructor's critical theories and actual
reading of the books under consideration was optional. Just on the other
side of the “bell curve's leading edge” loomed a complete psychic
collapse.
Lost in the Meritocracy reckons up the costs of a system where the
point is simply to keep accumulating points and never to look back—or
within. It's a remarkable book that suggests the first step toward
intellectual fulfillment is getting off the treadmill that is the American
meritocracy. Every American who has spent years of his or her life there
will experience many shocks of recognition while reading Walter Kirn’s
sharp, rueful, and often funny book—and likely a sense of liberation at
its end.
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