All Loves Excelling

by Josiah Bunting

Book Overview

A former headmaster of the prestigious Lawrenceville School, near Princeton, New Jersey, tells with an insider's authenticity the poignant story of the fierce competition for admission to select colleges-and the havoc the resulting stresses can wreak on one teenager and her ambitious family.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1882593405
• ISBN13: 9781882593408
• Release Date: February 2001
• Publisher: Bridge Works Publishing Company
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

Fine book -- with a dash of snobbery.

This is an excellent morality tale about parents who push their children to succeed in order to feed their own ambitions. Mr. Bunting seems to share my disapproval of the post-graduate year, and for the same reason: a single year spent at a boarding school is insufficent to transform a callow youth into someone the school can be proud to call one of their own. The first year at a superior school is jarring indeed, but these schools eventually teach their charges to handle pressure with grace...to find the sweet spot, as it were. As has been said before, the dark, dirty secret of New England (and mid-Atlantic) boarding schools is that their expertise lies in turning the mediocre sons and daughters of the rich into persons who can pass muster in any boardroom or ballroom. They do not exist to make brilliant students more so, or even to boost students' chances at gaining admission to popular colleges.This is a fine book and I recommend it to anyone with a passing interest in boarding schools or the college admission tumult. Those with an interest in education simply must read Mr. Bunting's AN EDUCATION FOR OUR TIME -- it is an absolute delight. Mr. Bunting is also the author of THE LIONHEADS, a highly original, brisk, and informed novel of the war in Vietnam.

Brutal pressure

This is the real deal! - Former Headmaster Bunting captures the whole enchilada with his book - it is a must read if you are involved in education -

A sensitive and compelling story

In All Loves Excelling, author Josiah Bunting draws upon his experiences as a former headmaster at the Lawrenceville School (near Princeton) to craft a sensitive and compelling story of Amanda, a young female student trying to handle the pressures that beset teenagers today including the fierce competition for admission to leading colleges, the expectations of ambitious parents, the self-promoting agendas of school officials, and the definitions of success prevalent in contemporary society. All Loves Excelling is a superbly crafted, original, and highly recommended novel.

A Crucial Book for our Time

This novel will scare you -- as it should. In it, Mr. Bunting reveals with taut exactitude, from the setting of a northeastern American boarding school, the chilling effects of the pressure we as a culture put on our most promising youth. All of the adults in this book are culpable, perhaps most so the two who understand Amanda, the main chararacter, but who, out of cowardice or compassion or cluelessness, do not act to stop the adults who understand her less well and who exercise their terrible, self-aggrandizing power over her. And, as reader, you will be gathered in to that adult culpability when you close the book and realize that although Amanda has been on its every page, you do not know her, really, either. How many of the young float before your eyes in your own life, unseen, unknown, and unassisted in what have become dangerous years in American life? The necessary darkness of this literary novel is relieved by its exceptionally lyrical writing, especially in Bunting's lush descriptions of the natural world that encompasses Amanda's prestigious campus. The Seneca River, which becomes almost a character itself, shows that life is how we see it, its reflection "shimmering" for one character, and first ebullient and then sinister for another. But the novel also shows that for the young, life is less how they see it and what they make of it than what they are made to make of it by those with unrealistic standards for and images of them. And the result is for many like Bunting's Amanda a battle for control of their very bodies.Readers who have never seen the inside of an elite American boarding school will be as interested in this novel as those who are the products of such an education. Mr. Bunting, who served as a headmaster for a decade, knows his terrain well, and the arcane traditions and curious customs of this world come vividly to life on his pages. But this book is no gentle Mr. Chips, no novel of manners. Instead, All Loves Excelling is a compelling argument against what we are doing to the young who are our future, and, perhaps, unlike the children and adults who populate Mr. Bunting's novel, readers of it, both young and old, will be moved by it to exercise our power in revolt against such pressure to bring childhood back to America. I am a teacher in such a school, and recently I have begun to sense a slight shift in the wind, barely perceptible, among girls very like Bunting's Amanda. If I am right, as adults it is, at the very least, our duty to help them in their effort to reinstitute a healthy brand of control over their own lives. Reading Bunting's book is a good start.

A Cautionary Tale

This work should be required reading for any parent with pre-college children, particularly daughters, and strongly recommended reading for any parent ... those of us with post-college offspring will see either what might have been but for the grace of God, or what regrettably was. The insidious nature of mis-guided, albeit well-meant, parental ambition lived out vicariously in our children is illuminated in a compelling, haunting, irresistible tale exceptionally well-told by author Bunting. This is his best work. His remarkable facility with the language makes the book a delight to read ... but disturbing, because he has skillfully limned each of the characters to be instantly rcognizable as "types" we all know. We find war and peace; villain and victim; controller and controlled ... characters you will love to hate, and others you will hate to love. Bunting writes of things he loves, thus comfortably; things he knows, thus authoritatively; things he has done and been, thus authentically; things he hates and fears, thus dramatically; and things he feels, thus most eloquently. Indeed, a cautionary tale for our time, extremely well told.