Chuck Klosterman | The Nineties

The Nineties

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It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.

Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a '90s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.

In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, "The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.

Anthropology
Media and Communications

Additional Information about the book

Publisher: Penguin Press

ISBN: ‎978-0735217959

ASIN: B094GNFS2T

Word Count: 115200 words

Length: 384 pages

Language: English

Release Date: February 8, 2022

Available as: Ebook,Paperback

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April 22, 2022
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Recommendable

Chuck Klosterman writes about the fascinating decade of the 90s, covering a vast variety of culture, politics, music, TV, movies, current events, technology and many other topics. As early as 2004, I was telling others on instant messenger that I was nostalgic for the 90s. Klosterman correctly notes that nostalgia is usually in part misplaced. As a teenager from the last years of Generation X (1965-81), I couldn't have the context for these formative years that we have now.

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