I had high hopes for this one, but it left me feeling underwhelmed. Klosterman’s writing is great as usual, but there was nothing overly intriguing discussed here and I found myself zoning out quite frequently.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Penguin Group- The Penguin Press for a copy of this social and pop culture study.

Chuck Klosterman writes in his collection of essays, The Nineties: A Book, about the last decade of the twentieth century with all its foibles, weirdness and possibilities. A popular president, that ended in scandal and the beginning of the rise of deplorables. Music that seemed to come from everywhere and everyone, that soon destroyed the music industry as acquiring music came from everywhere and everyone, just not the artists nor labels. A decade that ended with a Supreme Court presidency, falling towers and endless wars. And the Internet.

The book is written as themed essays covering music, politics, sports, trends life and pop culture. Lots of pop culture. Some things will have been forgotten, somethings should better be forgotten. The book is not a romp that the cover gives it, but a weighty study of a time and place, not a humor book that a lot of people might be expecting. I'm not sure if the audience is better served having come of age in this decade, or just lived through it, as I am sure what seems super important to some might to older or younger people be like hmm, that's interesting, tell me more about Blockbuster, I read about that in Readly, Player One.

As I lived through the nineties, I found some parts interesting, and those that I the time I did not, I didn't find interesting. As a social history there is a lot more information than I expected which I enjoyed. Fans of Mr. Klosterman will definitely like this book, others might skim through to the sections they remember, and try to live in the past.

Chuck Klosterman once again tries to make sense of the all-American pop culture diet.

This time, subjects include ‘90s staples such as Alanis Morissette, Ross Perot, and the budding 24-hour news cycle. This isn’t the first time that Klosterman has explored the relationship between consumption and identity. Most notably the teen protagonist of his 2008 debut novel, Downtown Owl, was a Klosterman proxy pondering this very same topic while considering the walls of his own bedroom: what greater purpose is there in having a poster of (insert artist/band) staring back at me?

As someone who has read plenty of his books and consumed many a podcast featuring him in the role of either host and guest, I feel as if I’ve previously heard him make some of the book’s arguments. However, Klosterman’s Cracker Jack diction is never boring.

What’s most striking about Klosterman’s latest book of essays is the topic of losing American monoculture, a subject I’ve definitely heard him speak on. In the ‘90s, you didn’t need to be a pop culture savant to know that Seinfeld was the #1 show on television or that Nirvana was a band that everyone was talking about. However, the pop culture landscape has been flattened in such a way that these shared cultural experiences are few and far between.

I would liken Klosterman’s latest as a murder mystery where monoculture is the victim and the reader finds out that it was the Internet that did it. However, the very first chapter happens to both uncover the murder weapon while simultaneously letting the primary suspect off the hook. In this particular piece, Klosterman brilliantly examines the Mandela Effect, a paranormal theory that could only gain traction and even a cult-like following in the Internet Age. But such a mass delusion is inherent to the human species. If the internet didn’t come along, we would just use something else to delude ourselves.

At this moment in time, everyone’s individual tastes and beliefs are now catered to and the all-American pop culture diet no longer exists. We are now a culture of picky eaters.

Chuck Klosterman is the master of pop-culture focused essays. I was so excited to get a copy of this thanks to the publisher. This book is as good as his others, this time focusing on a decade dense with pop culture.

This was a joy to read! What a wonderfully crafted work of history that somehow ties together an entire decade of culture, politics, sports, and everything else you can think of. The 90's have not quite entered the gaze of professional historians but Klosterman expertly weaves together a collection of essays that somehow encapsulate what we were like at the dawn of the internet age we now inhabit. Perfect for anyone who likes history, sociology, politics, or just existed in the 90s.

This book covered many different topics centering around the nineties so one is sure to grab your attention. This book is definitely for those who remember the nineties more from an adult perspective than from the small eyes of a child. This book thoroughly covered what should now be seen as a unique time solely for it being the last age before technology became so ingrained in our lives. Good for those who want to read snippets of history of the nineties through non-rose colored lenses.



I will post my review to goodreads and any publishers closer to the publication date.

The Nineties by Chick Klosterman is a collection of essays about different 90’s topics such as Nirvana and Kurt Cobain, Bill Clinton and the Clinton administration, the rise of the internet, Michael Jordan, among others.

While I did not find every topic to be the most interesting to me, the variety of 90’s topics covered is fairly wide so the average person will find something to enjoy. The topics ranged from music, to sports, to politics, and everything in between.

With the book’s somewhat narrow range (10 very specific years) it is intentionally reaching for an audience of Generation X’ers (or some older Millienials). As a person born in 1983 I found almost every topic covered in this book to have a connection to my “formative years” otherwise known as the nineties (middle school and most of high school).

Recommended for people who are interested in learning about the 90’s or for people who lived through it and want to revisit it.

3.5/5 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a free copy of this book to review.

Chuck Klosterman, best known as an essayist mostly devoted to pop culture (although I've only ever read his novels), tries to make sense of the decade in which he spent the better part of his 20s, the 1990s. Using the fall of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the Twin Towers as bookends, Klosterman takes a critical look at the culture, politics, social and economic trends, and most significantly the technological advances of the decade.

It's all here, even things you'd prefer to forget like Pauly Shore and O.J. Simpson. Klosterman seems to find a place for everything, even if the approach is scattershot stream of consciousness. You may not understand where he's going, but he appears to know how to get there. The result is fascinating for anyone who remembers the unique qualities of the 90s.

I remember the decade quite well. While Klosterman spent his young adulthood during this time, for me the 90s, centered around my 40th year, began with marriage and ended with business success (tech of course). Two children were born along the way. Making music may have fallen into hibernation, children filling any time left after 60-hour work weeks and two-weeks per month business trips, but I kept up with the musical currents of the decade. Backpacking around the world became a thing of the past for me, but traveling for work filled in the gap.

Two things stand out for me about the 1990s. Of my six decades, now into a so-far disastrous seventh, the 90s were unique. Yes there are some major exceptions like Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kuwait, but it was in general a time of unprecedented (and since unmatched) peace, prosperity, and progress. Klosterman doesn't make much of this, perhaps (having not lived through 1968, the stagflation 70s, or the hair styles of the 80s) taking for granted a time of relative calm nationwide and worldwide that allowed Americans to focus on grunge, Seinfeld, Bill Clinton's indiscretions, and yes, Pauly Shore.

If that quality of the 90s is understated, the impact of technology is grossly overstated. I co-owned and operated a successful business throughout the 90s in the networking and cellular spaces. Yes, the internet and mobile networks we now live inside of were creations of the 90s, but for the vast majority of us, they made no impact until the 21st century. Not only was the iPhone years away (2007), iPods weren't even introduced until 2001. Unless you lived in Sweden or Finland, texting only gained acceptance in 2000 (AIM wasn't even launched until 1997), social media even later (even MySpace did not exist until 2003 -- we were on Usenet in the 90s, the few of us who knew about it, remember Usenet?).

What was available technologically in the 1990s was opportunity, of which I was a beneficiary. The Nineties starts out with a meditation on GenX as slackers due to the lack of opportunity left by the Boomers. But that's wrong -- the economy of the 1990s was the best in my lifetime, it was rife with new possibilities for those willing to go for it, which would translate to the widespread popularity of these technologies in later decades. The slackers of the 90s were just slow to see it, living in the past instead of imagining the future.

So while I really enjoyed reliving a decade which ranks as my banner decade and may well be the world's best since, I don't know, ever?, I feel that Klosterman has stuck too closely to his personal point of view -- not that he could do anything else really, but I suspect he'd like his book to appeal to more than just his own generation.

But in the grand scheme of things, I view these as mere quibbles about a book that I really liked, something to write about in a review that allows for some of my own analysis. Thanks to NetGalley for an advance review copy in exchange for this honest review.

Really enjoyed this and think about it often. Klosterman does a great job of picking out different cultural moments from the 90's to see how we go there and the events that got us to the here and now. You can enjoy it for a nostalgia trip or use it as a deep dive into socio-political events. My only complaint was that he only glossed over hip hop history which had some big turning points at this time and slogged through some other chapters which were a little long winded. But I loved it and recommend it constantly. Definitely gave me a better idea of how we go to where we are today.

I was hoping for a more light-hearted non-fiction book about my favorite decade. I was a teenager during this period, and I absolutely loved everything from fashion, make-up, pop culture, t.v. shows, teen flicks, etc. This book read like a historical textbook than anything else. Why that's not an overall criticism, it's not what I had in mind when I read the description. I didn't feel any excitement or nostalgic feels. What I did like was reading about the start of Blockbuster video, the t.v. show Seinfeld, and the political landscape during the Clinton administration. The '90s was definitely a splashy and self-indulgent decade, and that's what made it special. The internet and the popularity of cell phones were great inventions, but I also feel this is the beginning of an end to innocence. I think the 1990-1997 was absolute perfection. Everything that came after felt lackluster and too commercialized. Interesting book, but just so-so for me. Chuck Klosterman sure did his research though. Good job, sir. Also, the cover is to die for! I wanted a phone like that when I was younger, but never got one.

Loved this, read it in one day, as I have with many other Chuck Klosterman books. So many good, highlightable passages. As a 90s kid myself, this was totally nostalgic. It was really interesting to look back at the intersection of pop culture, politics, and current events. So happy o read this, and I wish he would write a book for every decade!

<i>The Nineties</i> by Chuck Klosterman is collection of thoughtful essays that tells a loose narrative about the 1990s. Klosterman essentially argues that the nineties were characterized by a type of "post-modern" ambivalence, where it was paradoxically cool to nerd out on niche cultural artifacts (e.g. Tarantino about eclectic or mediocre films that filled the shelves of Blockbusters) and be completely disinterested in events of major importance (e.g. political participation and differentiation were at local minimums). Klosterman weaves his arguments around some major events in the 90s like presidential elections, the Gulf War, the Oklahoma City Bombing, Y2K, 9/11, etc. There is a special focus on music, politics, television and film of the era (expressed in the order of Klosterman's focus).

I found the way Klosterman's framing of the nineties compelling, probably in part due to its concordance with my understanding of that decade too (though I didn't experience it as an adult as a 90s baby myself). This is also likely due to the difficulty one would have characterizing the nineties in any other way. The recent, popular historiography and cultural criticism is either so potent, so omnipresent, or so accurate that alternative visions are automatically unpersuasive. However, within this prescribed vision Klosterman is pretty creative, insightful, and detailed. He helps bridge that liminal space between our memory of the recent past and how the past actually was.

However, several of the essays could be improved with expanded analysis and wider breadth. For instance, we get several mentions of David Foster Wallace and his importance to the literary culture of the nineties, but we don't get any comments on his work. Klosterman does try to focus more on items of popular culture but he still made time for discussion of several niche independent films and other much less impactful items of culture compared to <i>Infinite Jest</i>. Moreover, some of the political commentary is a bit sophomoric or shortsighted. Klosterman paints the election of 2000 as the watershed moment for hyperpartisanship, but a lot of extensive scholarship would indicate it was a trend that started much earlier and was largely unavoidable in light of a number of social forces.

Overall, I recommend <i>The Nineties</i> to all culturally aware Gen-Xers and Millennials (maybe some Boomers will enjoy too).

I have to be honest, this book wasn't at all what I was expecting. I was a little disappointed and chose not to finish it. I guess I got a little excited about the title and picture on the front and expected to see more of that style. I was looking for bright pictures and a little laugh looking back at what I had lived and really didn't feel that at all from this book.
I am not saying it is a bad book however because for the right reader it will be a much loved looked happenings from that era. Personally, I was looking at something to flick through and enjoy a little nostalgia for this type of book rather than a deep read.

The Nineties is a reminder of that time before cellphones and Google, where it was OK to not know where your friend was, or what they are doing at every moment (such as on twitter) The 1990's was such a simple and easy time to grow up.

Join along as Klosterman ventures through everything from politics, to movies, to music, and other trends. It was such a refreshing reminder of how things used to be back in my favorite decade to be alive. With sharp wit, a touch of humor, and some interesting writing tactics this book is a can't miss for Gen X to reminisce, but also a great book to show our newer generations that we thrived on so many things that are now extinct.

This book isn't perfect, and you wont always agree with every word written, but I found myself enthralled in almost every essay anyway. I definitely recommend this blast from the past.

Thank you to netgalley and publisher for providing an advanced e-copy for me to read and leave my honest opinion. I feel very lucky to have experienced this book and cannot wait for it to hit shelves so I can spread it around to people I know will appreciate it.

A very funny look at the 90s covering all aspects of politics, cultural and social change with a dose of cynical commentary typical of Chuck Klosterman.

As someone who was a high school student during the 90s, I was eager to read this book. Previous comments have stated that the beginning dragged a bit--I actually felt the opposite! I read aloud bits to my husband (slightly older than me--not entirely a 90s kid!) because I was so invested in what I was reading.

People may quibble with parts that were left out, but I felt that this was a great overview of the decade.

Librarians/booksellers: Definitely purchase for your Gen X patrons!

Many thanks to Penguin/PRH and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

A weave of pop culture through the 90s. I honestly read this book because of the cover. A sick version of the clear telephone will always pull me in. I went in not expecting much and I was very surprised. The first chapter was lagging and I was not looking forward to the rest of the book, but it really turned around. A lot of topics were covered on a surface level, from TV, to movies, to celebrities, to crime, to music, to politics, but it didn’t feel rushed.

An excellent review of the 90s. Klosterman does a great job weaving pop culture throughout his narrative. I enjoyed thinking/relearning about events that we thought were important at the time that I've not thought about in 30 years.

Recommended to all those 90s kids.

I've read everything by this author and this book does not disappoint. Great look back into a decade that feels near and far at the same time. Some essays were dense but others flowed so easily it felt like I was living through it again.

A delightful book of essays on the 90s. Klosterman’s writing is so smart and funny. I really enjoyed this book and will read more of him. Thanks for ARC.