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The Nineties cover art

The Nineties

By: Chuck Klosterman
Narrated by: Chuck Klosterman, Dion Graham
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Summary

An instant New York Times best seller!

From the best-selling 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 '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.

©2022 Chuck Klosterman (P)2022 Penguin Audio
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

Critic reviews

“In The Nineties, Klosterman examines the social, political and cultural history of the era with his signature wit. It’s a fascinating trip down memory lane.” Time

“Always an astute cultural observer and a fan of deep dives into any subject, Klosterman is focused here on a decade in American life that he says is often portrayed as ‘a low-risk grunge cartoon’ . . . Klosterman’s gift is seizing on those moments that any Gen Xer can readily recall and pulling the strings a bit to put it in some kind of historical perspective.” —Associated Press

“Serving up the moments and meanings of a modern decade in a few hundred pages is no easy task, but Chuck Klosterman has managed to boil a hearty stew of insight. . . . [Klosterman is] a master of smooth setups and downbeat finishes.” USA Today

What listeners say about The Nineties

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Enjoyable and informative refresh

In truth I had hoped for something a little less US centric and I initially wondered whether I would finish. After the first chapter this stopped being an issue, the book was informative and interesting, never too heavy. Whilst not all the touch points meant so much to someone on the other side of the pond,many were still relevant - either through the global impact they had or because of the similarities in US and UK cultures

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The World before…

American centric but became more and more interesting. Go back to life without a smartphone.

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avoid

as someone from the uk I found this boring not much relevance to me, and I grew up in the 90's.

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superb history book

Superb book. Klosterman looks at how things were, not how they should be. The attitudes, the hopes, the tastes, the fears of people at the time. He admits its hard to summarise and entire populations belief but all of his points are backed with both statistics and anecdotes. very well researched and enjoyable to read. It's very funny at times.

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