An instant New York Times bestseller! From the bestselling author
of But What if We're Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the
decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying
too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any
decade in American history. 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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