The Nineties: A Book
Hardcover
From the publisher's website:
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
90’s 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.
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