Andrew Ferguson’s wise and often hilarious Crazy Uexplores the contemporary fanaticism over getting one’s kids into the “right” college and is based on his own experience with his son. Towards the end of the book he describes the process of writing the all important personal essays that are a key element in the admissions decision. His high school senior son, as Ferguson describes him, is certainly bright enough, but in most ways pretty much par for the course: sports obsessed, rather scatter-brained, and possessed of all the introspection of an unripe cantaloupe. Yet here are all these schools demanding he ransack his seventeen years of life experience for pivotal moments, the more emotionally raw the better—the ones that allegedly enlarged his humanity or instructed him in perseverance and otherwise left him in possession of the tools that those on
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