One of "Rolling Stone"'s 20 Best Music Books of 2013

When memoirist and head writer for "The A.V. Club" Nathan Rabin first set out to write about obsessed music fans, he had no idea the journey would take him to the deepest recesses of both the pop culture universe and his own mind. For two very curious years, Rabin, who Mindy Kaling called "smart and funny" in "The New Yorker," hit the road with two of music's most well-established fanbases: Phish's hippie fans and Insane Clown Posse's notorious "Juggalos." Musically or style-wise, these two groups could not be more different from each other, and Rabin, admittedly, was a cynic about both bands. But once he gets deep below the surface, past the caricatures and into the essence of their collective cultures, he discovers that both groups have tapped into the human need for community. Rabin also grapples with his own mental well-being--he discovers that he is bipolar--and his journey is both a prism for cultural analysis and a deeply personal exploration, equal parts humor and heart.

In the beginning, Nathan Rabin set out to re-examine infamous films that are reviled for the sheer weight of their failure: whether it was bad acting, bad directing, bad writing, or the colossal amount of money spent to produce them. "My Year of Flops," Rabin's column, appeared regularly in The A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion, starting in early 2007, and it became so popular that he extended his experiment indefinitely. In many cases, he agrees with popular opinion and therefore labels the film a "Failure." However, as we all know, failure can often be fascinating, in which case, Rabin calls the results a "Fiasco"-from The Bonfire of the Vanities to Waterworld to Elizabethtown. Better, still, are the films that emerge from the ashes and turn out to actually be pretty good. Those are the "Secret Successes." Some of these include The Wiz, Heaven's Gate, Joe Vs. the Volcano, and even everyone's favourite film flop punch line, Ishtar.

Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape throughout his childhood and adolescence. As an adult, pop culture became his life. Head writer for "A.V. Club "for more than a decade, Rabin uses specific books, songs, albums, films, and television shows as springboards for dissecting his Dickensian life story in his acclaimed memoir "The Big Rewind."
Rabin writes movingly and hilariously about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment during a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. A fun book about depression, "The Big Rewind "is ultimately a touching narrative of a motherless child's search for family and acceptance, and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin's lovable, hard-luck dad.
With comic dissertations on everything from "The Simpsons "to "The Great Gatsby, "and from "Grey Gardens "to Dr. Dre, "The Big Rewind "chronicles Rabin's improbable yet all-too-true journey through life, and its fortuitous intersections with the dizzyingly wonderful world of entertainment.