THE NINETIES by Chuck Klosterman (Penguin Press, February 2022)
Hardcover, 370 pages. ISBN # 0734217955 / 9780735217959
Summary on the Goodreads website . . . . .
The Nineties: 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.
My Five-Star Review on the Goodreads website . . . . .
To chronicle an entire decades worth of historical happenings is a tall order; but damn if Chuck Klosterman doesn't pull it off. I lived through this decade, remember it well, and can't think of a single significant thing that he may have left out.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall though the rise of the computer, Klosterman covers all the bases and shines a spotlight on politics, music, film, television, sports, drama as well as the tragedies, conflicts, and controversies of the time. He has a keen eye for focusing on the key details, providing an objective summary of the facts, and then adding his own commentary.
An important book. I hope he decides to focus on other decades of modern history in future books. THE NINETIES is worthy of a college level course and should generate much discussion.
