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Book Review of All Loves Excelling

All Loves Excelling
reviewed on


This novel tells the story of a teen-ager under pressure to gain admission to an Ivy League college.

The author served as the headmaster of an elite boarding school near Princeton, NJ, and we get the sense that he writes from personal experience with some of the teens who attend these schools. Bunting later became Superintendent of Virginia Military Institute.

From Bunting's biography at the VMI web site: "His novel _All Loves Excelling_, is set in an upstate New York boarding school. The book chronicles [a] year in the life of a senior girl at the school - a victim of misshapen parental ambition and of a school for whom students have become dehumanized units of calculation, prestige, and measurement. It is a savage commentary on the culture of today's elite boarding schools and the casualties of that culture."