DREAMWalker Group
Where creativity and spirit converge

 

 

 
To assist you in finding books you enjoy reading, you can search this site for authors or artists and look at their profile pages:
 

By first name

By last name

By subjects

 

 

SPONSORS

A bridge supporting dialog

 

Michael Walker's Blog
(Awakened Man's World)

Our DREAMTeam

Email Us

 

 

Affiliates

 

Works by
Walter Kirn
(Writer)
[1963 - ]

Email:  ???
(Please fix this email address before you use it.
We're trying to reduce spam! )
Website:  ???
Facebook
Profile created February 18, 2010
Fiction
  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

Non-fiction
  • 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.

(We need your help! 
Let us know if you have updated information for this page!
Write us at
dreamwalkergroup@me.com)
 

Click any of the following links for more information on similar topics of interest in relation to this page.

Subjects Listed Under

Related Topics

Walter Kirn
Is Listed As A Favorite Of
(Alphabetical Order
By First Name)

TO BE DETERMINED

Walter's Favorite
Authors/Books
(Alphabetical Order
By First Name)
[As of x]

TO BE DETERMINED

DREAMWaker Group is not incorporated as a non-profit organization.

Your donations help defray the cost of running this site but are not tax-deductible
as charitable expenses
.  See your tax consultant for more information.

Site Design and
Copyright © 2002-21 by
DREAMWalker Group
Email Us

Proprietor - Michael Walker  

Editorial - Catherine Groves  Michael Walker 

Layout & Design Michael Walker