Americas
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The Nineties: A Book
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.
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.
Editorial 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
"An engaging, nuanced and literate take on the alternately dynamic and diffident decade." -Washington Post
"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
"[Klosterman is] Generation X's definitive chronicler of culture." -GQ
"From one of our great chroniclers of pop culture comes this entertaining romp through the twilight years of the twentieth century. . . . Roving across flashpoints in movies, music, and politics, Klosterman captures a world where apathy was the defining tone, art was experiencing a seismic shift, and celebrity culture was on the eve of a digital explosion." -Esquire
"Simultaneously a deep and light sprint through the decade that doesn't just namecheck people and bands and movies, but burrows under as to why they were important then. And what that means today. . . . Klosterman zips in and around the entirety of the decade, and even readers who were up on pop culture at the time will be reminded of things they haven't thought about in two or more decades. . . . If you came of age in the '90s, you will love The Nineties. If not, it's a singularly wonderful analytical and historical book of a time not so long ago." -Houston Press
"Leave it to Chuck Klosterman to examine the decade in a fresh, unpredictable way that avoids nostalgia and easy generalizations. . . . Klosterman's text is never anything less than wise, challenging and winningly idiosyncratic." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"An informative, endlessly entertaining look back at the 1990s. . . . What [Klosterman] always succeeds at is conveying an anecdote, oddity, or thought exercise about the decade that you immediately want to share with a friend." -BuzzFeed
"An engaging, nuanced and literate take on the alternately dynamic and diffident decade." -Washington Post
"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
"[Klosterman is] Generation X's definitive chronicler of culture." -GQ
"From one of our great chroniclers of pop culture comes this entertaining romp through the twilight years of the twentieth century. . . . Roving across flashpoints in movies, music, and politics, Klosterman captures a world where apathy was the defining tone, art was experiencing a seismic shift, and celebrity culture was on the eve of a digital explosion." -Esquire
"Simultaneously a deep and light sprint through the decade that doesn't just namecheck people and bands and movies, but burrows under as to why they were important then. And what that means today. . . . Klosterman zips in and around the entirety of the decade, and even readers who were up on pop culture at the time will be reminded of things they haven't thought about in two or more decades. . . . If you came of age in the '90s, you will love The Nineties. If not, it's a singularly wonderful analytical and historical book of a time not so long ago." -Houston Press
"Leave it to Chuck Klosterman to examine the decade in a fresh, unpredictable way that avoids nostalgia and easy generalizations. . . . Klosterman's text is never anything less than wise, challenging and winningly idiosyncratic." -Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"An informative, endlessly entertaining look back at the 1990s. . . . What [Klosterman] always succeeds at is conveying an anecdote, oddity, or thought exercise about the decade that you immediately want to share with a friend." -BuzzFeed
Readers Top Reviews
Norcalsurfski1993
I am a year older than Klosterman so probably shared an almost identical experience of the Nineties as he did, and this is a tremendously interesting book. Klosterman does a wonderful job describing not just WHAT happened (that would be boring), but provided context for the SIGNIFICANCE of what happened, particularly under the lens of 30 years of retroactive perspective. This is the best 4-star rating I have ever given a book, in that it really is deserving of 5 stars short of a few drawbacks: 1. At times, Klosterman's writing was brilliant; at others, he spoke in such terms so abstract that I had no idea what he meant. Examples of the latter include his description of the TV series ER as "either the place you were going to leave or the place you ended up" or his characterization of Bill Clinton's reputation such that "conflict over who he was did not emerge over time. It was always there, before anything else." WHAT?! 2. He overcites certain sources such as "The Village Voice," which has its political leanings and thus colors the analysis of the events of discussion. 3. He seems to put too much of an emphasis on certain events, not quite knowing when to end it, which seem to cross into repetitiveness. Despite these downfalls, this book is exceptionally interesting and gave me a chance to reflect on my own recollections and experiences of this formative decade of my own life. I am now anxiously awaiting his book on the 2000s. (Hint, hint Klosterman!)
Jamison E. Ousley
I read everything Klosterman writes, so this is not an unbiased review. His work is always interesting, and his perspective is always fresh. As the decade he covers in this review gets further in the rear view, the more important it seems to revisit that history. I blame it on the Kindle format, but the book felt really short. It ended when I was at 66%. The rest is all acknowledgements and index. Still essential though.
ericJamison E. Ou
I learned a lot about the 90s. This book helped me understand a decade that I was too young to understand at the time
Sarah L.ericJamis
Based off this cover I thought this book was going to be a fun look at some fads and highlights of the 90s. It was that but also much more. This book went into a much more in depth look and analysis at many things that happened in the 90s including sports, the rise of the internet, politics, music, etc. The author looked at the 90s through the lens of today and it was interesting to view them and events and people that way…some (many) things did not age well. I’m making this book sound dry and boring but it was actually a really good read and not overly heavy at all! The narrator on the audio did a great job and I felt like the audiobook helped make this book move quickly. The different narrator for what sounded like chapter headings and footnotes was helpful. Despite my cheery view of the 90s being tarnished a bit it’s still one of my favorite decades and it was fun to look back on it. This book definitely took me back to my teenage years.
Timothy HaughSara
I am a big fan of Mr. Klosterman’s nonfiction, which has recently been mainly cultural criticism based in a history of music criticism. I Wear the Black Hat and But What If We’re Wrong? are a couple of my favorites. He has two skills that I find impressive. One, he can make topics I care very little about interesting and, two, he can find significant themes in our culture that have a more universal importance. In The Nineties, Mr. Klosterman’s main theme seems to be that the way we think about things now is not the way we thought about things then. This seems an obvious truth that could be applied to any decade; however, it is disconcerting how often we seem to ignore this. And yet, for those of us who have clear memories of the decade in question, he is able repeatedly to drive this point home while reminding us of events at the end of the last millennium. One way he is able to do this easily is through technology. Because the Y2K problem never happened, we forget how much we worried about it and how much effort went into making sure the bug was fixed. We forget how few people had cell phones and internet, and what that meant. We didn’t understand the impact that the VCR boom of the eighties was going to have on the movies made in the nineties. The deeper dive is into the cultural changes. Remember when Bill Clinton was the most popular president ever after his acquittal (nearing 80% approval rating) and Monica Lewinsky was reviled? Now, Clinton is mostly considered vile and is ignored while Ms. Lewinsky has recovered her reputation. The people and events didn’t change, but the culture did. Remember how most people considered pre-environmentalist Al Gore and pre-9/11 George Bush to be so alike that the election between them was essentially a tie in Florida? Now, that election seems very consequential. Mr. Klosterman covers a lot of ground, but I hope I’ve given a taste of some of what he’s on about. I wouldn’t consider this one of his best books. To its detriment, this feels somewhat more planned than his other books which are more like collections of independent essays. I expected his music references because I know his career arc, but I wasn’t really interested in his discussion of Kurt Cobain and Nevermind, which I never cared for. Still, I like a writer willing to take on big ideas and this book definitely got me thinking and remembering.
Short Excerpt Teaser
INTRODUCTION
The Nineties began on January 1 of 1990, except for the fact that of course they did not. Decades are about cultural perception, and culture can't read a clock. The 1950s started in the 1940s. The sixties began when John Kennedy demanded we go to the moon in '62 and ended with the shootings at Kent State in May of 1970. The seventies were conceived the morning after Altamont in 1969 and expired during the opening credits of American Gigolo, which means there were five months when the sixties and the seventies were happening at the same time. It felt like the eighties might live forever when the Berlin Wall fell in November of '89, but that was actually the onset of the euthanasia (though it took another two years for the patient to die).
When writing about recent history, the inclination is to claim whatever we think about the past is secretly backward. "Most Americans regard the Seventies as an eminently forgettable decade," historian Bruce J. Schulman writes in his book The Seventies. "This impression could hardly be more wrong." In the opening sentence of The Fifties, journalist David Halberstam notes how the 1950s are inevitably recalled as a series of black-and-white photographs, in contrast to how the sixties were captured as moving images in living color. This, he argued, perpetuates the illusionary memory of the fifties being "slower, almost languid." There's always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was. What's complicated about the 1990s is that the central illusion is memory itself.
The boilerplate portrait of the American nineties makes the whole era look like a low-risk grunge cartoon. That portrait is imperfect. It is not, however, wildly incorrect. The decade was heavily mediated and assertively self-conscious, but not skewed and misshapen by the internet and social media. Its trajectory can be traced with accuracy. Almost every meaningful moment of the nineties was captured on videotape, along with thousands upon thousands of trivial moments that meant nothing at all. The record is relatively complete. But that deluge of data remained, at the time, ephemeral and unavailable. It was still a present-tense existence. For much of the decade, Seinfeld was the most popular, most transformative live-action show on television. It altered the language and shifted comedic sensibilities, and almost every random episode was witnessed by more people than the 2019 finale of Game of Thrones. Yet if you missed an episode of Seinfeld, you simply missed it. You had to wait until it was re-aired the following summer, when you could try to manually record it on VHS videotape. If you missed it again, the only option was to go to a public archive in Los Angeles or Manhattan and request a special viewing on eight-millimeter videotape. But of course, this limitation was not something people worried about, because caring that much about any TV show was not a normal thing to do. And even if you did, you would pretend you did not, because this was the nineties. You would be more likely to claim that you didn't own a television.
That, more than any person or event, informed the experience of nineties life: an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard. Every generation melodramatically assumes it will somehow be the last, and there was some of that in the nineties, too-but not as much as in the decade that came before and far less than in the decades that would come after. It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional. Many of the polarizing issues that dominate contemporary discourse were already in play, but ensconced as thought experiments in academic circles. It was, in retrospect, a remarkably easy time to be alive. There were still nuclear weapons, but there was not going to be a nuclear war. The internet was coming, but reluctantly, and there was no reason to believe it would be anything but awesome. The United States experienced a prolonged period of economic growth without the protracted complications of a hot or cold war, making it possible to focus on one's own subsistence as if the rest of society were barely there. Concerns and anxieties were omnipresent, but the stakes were vague: Teenagers were allegedly obsessed with angst
