Rating: 
Summary: dangers of majoring in perfection
Review: ...and would have enjoyed it even more had Molly Connally's review from School Library Journal not completely spoiled the ending.
Rating:
Summary: All ambitious parents should read this book.
Review: A couple of years ago, I read An Education For Our Time, also by Josiah Bunting. That book has been an inspiration for me ever since - so I eagerly awaited the release of All Loves Excelling. This is a very good book. I would highly reccomend it to all parents who want the best for their children, but worry whether or not they are pushing too hard or turning their children into extensions of their own ambition. The message of All Loves Excelling is that their is no substitute for unconditional love when it comes to raising children. I teach in a school very much the opposite of the one portrayed in All Loves Excelling. The main problem here is lack of parental involvement, and parents who love their children but fail to provide them with any dreams or direction.I suppose we need to find a middle ground between apathy and Amanda's world. Josiah Bunting is one of the clearest voices in America these days on the subject of how we educate our children, and on the role of education in American culture. If more people read his books, we would be much better off.
Rating:
Summary: dangers of majoring in perfection
Review: A teenager with modest but definite gifts in music, English and athletics passively but obediently attempts to follow the path her mother sets for her. In doing so, she falls prey to the problems that dog many perfectionistic young women: an eating disorder, and lack of healthy assertiveness. We witness her struggle at an exclusive boarding school which excels in preparing its students for the Ivy League and other prestigious schools. There is a kind of grim humor - that I who attended such a college could smile at - in the students' pursuit of perfection. But the book ends in tragedy, and the reader has seen enough foreshadowing to expect it - an excellent cautionary tale on the dangers of being an over-achiever.
Rating: 
Summary: Important Message in a Mediocre Package
Review: Although Bunting's novel addresses a timely and important issue--the pressure for teens to get into the "right college" by packaging themselves (with the help of parents and various professionals) as what they think colleges want --I was very disappointed by the book as a whole.
The characters are ludicrous stereotypes, the grammar is frequently flawed, the passages regarding Amanda's piano studies are unrealistic, and the plot was painfully predictable. The author was clearly motivated by the desire to illustrate an important message for his readers. The book is not, however, a work of literature.
Rating: 
Summary: Bunting's Lessons Essential, The Writing Isn't
Review: Bunting's novel makes an incredibly important statement. As much as I wish things like this never happened, even at the nation's elite schools--he is correct. And parents like Tess do exist. Sadly, that is an accurate portrait. Kids like Amanda, the quiet, but special ones, can easily slip through the cracks. As an educator, I've seen it and heard about from colleagues at day schools and boarding schools across the country. For his call to arms (perhaps that was a very poor choice of words),I praise Mr. Bunting. The book itself is not as good as his message. The writing is at times rather disaffected. Others passionate. Flowerly prose that seems at odds with the passages. Even more, the incessant foreshadowing takes away from what could have been a subtle story. You figure out early where this is headed. A "coming of age novel" as one reviewer on the jacket called it--is something of a different sort. The characters are not all that vivid...they are rather thin (pun intended)--perhaps that was the point and I missed it. I could go on and on, but don't want to say much else. Important lesson. A Execution. B-
Rating: 
Summary: For anyone who works with the ambitious
Review: Bunting's work accurately describes the multiple pressures that challenge high school students across the country. He captures the academic abilities of most students by allowing Amanda (main character) to excel beyond her years in some subjects, yet struggle fiercely with others. The descriptions of Amanda's mother are frightening but true - she seeks to create the 'perfect well-rounded child' in her daughter and is relentless in this pursuit. Any parent whose dreams include children at an Ivy League school should read this book - and heed Bunting's warnings as to the result of a neurotic ambition.
Rating:
Summary: Good message, poor writing
Review: I really wanted to like this book, and at the end I did feel that the author conveyed a great message about parental pressure and the effect it has on children. My children attended private schools and I know that this kind of pressure is more common than not....but that it also occurs in ALL schools. Other reviewers have synopsized the plot, so I won't bother to repeat their efforts. Unfortunately, the writing style was a total turn off. It was oddly written, stiff, just plain strange. The plot was predictable and the characters were wooden. It is a shame that this was the case because it is sure to keep the book from being appealing to more people.
Rating:
Summary: Eye Opening Novel for the Enlightened at Prep School
Review: I'm currrently a student at a prep school and some students I know often face the issue of overambitious parents. This book grips the reality of the stresses that EXTREMELY high expectations place on the students in addition to the parents. Although this case is rather extreme, it shows the emotional and physical destruction an adolescent can experirience to when their parents' vaulting ambition seems to replace the love their parent has for their child.
Rating:
Summary: Some parental love is not love
Review: I've just finished reading a recently published novel that I highly recommend if you have an interest in anorexia, in suicide, in the pervasiveness of psychoactive prescription drugs in our culture, and in what drives a certain kind of parent in competitive college admissions, and a certain kind of child in cooperating with those abusive and destructive ambitions. The book is by Josiah Bunting III, and is called ALL LOVES EXCELLING. It's published by Bridge Works Publishing, Bridgehampton, N.Y. 2001. He knows whereof he speaks. He is a long time headmaster and college president at several institutions, the book jacket says, and currently superintendent of Virginia Military Institute. His style is crisp, surprising, and vivid. The book reads well and quickly. And for those who want to understand anorexia from the inside out, this is an exceptional opportunity. The book is a critique of the BoBo, SUV culture, of how ignorant, loveless, materialistic and abusive parental educational ambition destroys the body and soul of its children. It is like ORDINARY PEOPLE in showing us how it feels from the inside to be self-destructive and like CATCHER IN THE RYE in delivering a view of dehumanizing independent education from the point of view of the student, except in this book the protagonist is a young woman. The book is about an only child, a girl, Amanda, attending for a post graduate year a fictional boarding school in upstate New York called St. Matthew's. She had been rejected or waitlisted at all the colleges to which she had applied from a Long Island public high school, including her top choice, Dartmouth. Her parents, with her apprehensive cooperation, agree to invest the $30,000 tuition for the P.G. year. She is also a cross country runner and a pianist. The book tells the story of how her mother's expectations combine with the girl's own perfectionistic dutifulness, and the focused cynicism of the college admissions process, to drive the girl to anorexia, (hyperexercise, isolation, restriction, and bingeing and purging), self-medication, and finally suicide when she doesn't get in. She can't bear the thought of her mother's rage at her daughter's "failure." Yet the girl herself, is intrinsically sweet, hard working, intuitively astute about the poetry of Houseman and Hopkins, a "lovely girl" in the pre-PC phrase of the book's kindly but ineffective headmaster. The book seems at first to be a celebration of rigorous independent school education, but by the end the book becomes an indictment, not of rigor exactly, but of meaningless rigor, and of the lack of humane, caring vigilance of the school for its students. It's sort of a coed DEAD POETS SOCIETY, only this time the villain is the mother who guilt trips the child into death rather than as in DPS, the father. It is a case study of what happens when love is made conditional on academic performance. And it is an angry call to not let such things happen again. Even the genuine but passive love of the father, a football watching Fordham graduate, is not enough to save the girls from herself and her mother. Every parent with high hopes for a child and every student wanting to please and accommodate such a parent will recognize in this novel their worst nightmare and easiest excuses. The book is not, in the end, a great novel, a GATSBY or a HUCKLEBERRY FINN, but it does tell us all too truly where and how we have gone wrong at the top tier of education in our own age. It is perhaps more like an UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. Bunting does not offer an institutional or reformist remedy. His book is his attempt to do what he can to change the culture. I think it says that each of us, by individual effort and grace, must notice and attend and confront the madness wherever and whenever we encounter it. And those in positions of leadership, whether fathers in families or administrators in school, must figure out how to teach concern for the person FIRST and performance somewhere else down the line.
Rating:
Summary: A sensitive and compelling story
Review: 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.
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