"Andrew Choate's Learning is a dazzling testament to remaining forever a student in the for-profit racket known as life, particularly the university of hard knocks. Free of hierarchical notions about where or from whom one gets an education, Choate gleans knowledge from disparate sources including his 8th-grade girlfriend, the Viennese poet Friederike Mayr cker, and an issue of the New Yorker that he read to his father, who was struggling to recover...