Looking for class

Oxford and Cambridge are two of the most fabled academic institutions in the world; graduates include John Milton and Lord Byron, Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, and, more recently, President Bill Clinton. For eight centuries, students have journeyed to Oxbridge to drink in the nectar of the classics and train in the sports of the Greeks. Then, in 1990, American writer Bruce Feiler arrived ... Looking for Class is a hilarious and enlightening account of a year at Oxford and Cambridge by a talented young writer who won wide acclaim for his first book, Learning to Bow, an educational odyssey set in Japan. For his new adventure abroad, Feiler lived as a graduate student at Cambridge. He has written this comic expose with the dry wit of a British novelist and the irreverence of an American journalist. The result is a bawdy and illuminating pageant of British life, a cross between P.G. Wodehouse and P.J. O'Rourke, Brideshead Revisited and Animal House.

Feiler shows us Oxbridge from all angles - the garden parties and formal balls, high-minded dormitory debates and late-night drinking Olympics, stuffy tutorials and weeklong exams. Along the way, he matches wits with the quickest tongue in the school during an "English-style" debate; rows in Cambridge's most exclusive athletic ritual; and learns lessons in love from a Rhodes Scholar. At a time when America's meritocracy is draping itself in the fine cloth of elite British education, Bruce Feiler has ventured into the dark and dusty halls of Anglo academia and demystified British education. What he has discovered is entertaining, informative, and highly relevant to our own educational system. Bruce Feiler is one of the most promising young writers at work today. With remarkable insight, he penetrates Oxford and Cambridge, a world romanticized but rarely seen.