If you needed to take an important call, you just had to sit in the living room and wait for it. Here’s a great passage about telephones during the decade: “Modern people worry about smartphone addiction, despite the fact that landlines exercised much more control over the owner. Klosterman’s gift is seizing on those moments that any Gen Xer can readily recall and pulling the strings a bit to put it in some kind of historical perspective. The worst thing you could be was a sellout… (which) meant you needed to be popular, and any explicit desire for approval was enough to prove you were terrible.”Ģ more Oath Keepers sentenced to prison terms for Jan. Always an astute cultural observer and a fan of deep dives into any subject, Klosterman is focused here on a decade in American life that he says is often portrayed as “a low-risk grunge cartoon.” Or put another way: “The nineties were not an age for the aspirant. And there’s no one more qualified to write it than Chuck Klosterman. “The Nineties” by Chuck Klosterman (Penguin Press)įew things make a book reviewer feel older than reading a book - words on actual tree pulp, bound together with a hard cover - that ruminates on the essential news events and pop culture milestones that happened when the reviewer was in his 20s.īut such is “The Nineties,” which is subtitled “A Book,” just in case generations after X don’t remember those. Wonderfully researched, compellingly written, and often very funny, this is a superb reassessment of an underappreciated decade from a stupendously gifted essayist.This cover image released by Penguin Press shows 'The Nineties,' by Chuck Klosterman. Klosterman bookends the decade with the two Bush presidencies, and the fascinating effect of third-party candidates Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.

His writing is strongest when he looks at moments through a contemporary lens, including assessments of the impact of Bill Clinton and ardor for the film American Beauty (1999).

Klosterman makes compelling connections, such as the rising fear of genetic engineering and the success of Jurassic Park (1993), and explores how much that is ubiquitous now-the internet, political polarization-can be traced back to this underexamined decade. He moves on to question the slacker image, focusing on what this generation actually liked, including the contradictory popularity of both Garth Brooks and Nirvana. He begins by exploring how Douglas Coupland’s Generation X (1991) was an odd place for that generation’s name to originate. Like Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987), Klosterman explains what it felt like to live through this decade. In stark contrast to Klosterman’s previous work, Raised in Captivity (2019), a frenetic and inventive fiction collection, his latest is a self-described work of “popular criticism” about the 1990s.

Book review the nineties klosterman