Far from stuffy cultural analysis, it feels like reminiscing with a witty, nerdy, insightful friend. Much of what Klosterman writes seems obvious once he writes it, but in a way you wouldn't have been able to articulate beforehand. But he doesn't cater to modern readers by insisting today's evaluations are superior. Klosterman frequently contrasts how things were perceived in the '90s with how they are or would be seen now. Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was. Anyone imposing a neat message on 10 years of disparate events and trends is probably trying too hard to sell you on something.īut there are preoccupations, like how some of today's obsessions-politics, personal branding-were less important ('political engagement was still viewed as optional') or even anathema (people of the '90s had 'an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard'). Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job. There is no overarching theme, and perhaps there couldn't be. There's Nirvana and the first Iraq war Google and steroids in baseball American Beauty, Ebonics, and Waco VCRs, Crystal Pepsi, and Ross Perot. If not, it’s a singularly wonderful analytical and historical book of a time not so long ago. That's the overall experience of reading The Nineties-a collection of breezy and dryly humorous dispatches from our current moment about iconic events, artifacts, postures, and controversies from three decades ago. If you came of age in the ’90s, you will love The Nineties. Without pronouncing judgment on the shift, the book riffs on it for a few pages before morphing into an analysis of the song 'Achy Breaky Heart,' then segueing to Garth Brooks, Seinfeld, and Titanic.

Today, 'if you ask a semi-educated young person to identify the root cause of most American problems, there's a strong possibility they will say, 'Capitalism.'' In the '90s, the more probable answer 'would have been commercialism.' So observes the wide-ranging culture critic Chuck Klosterman in The Nineties: A Book.

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