A review by anniefwrites
The Nineties, by Chuck Klosterman

informative reflective medium-paced
Overall, I learned a lot from this book about a period of time that I’ve always loved and been fascinated by. I was born in the mid-1990s, so I remember little of what the period was actually like, and have no way of knowing how adults experienced it. Klosterman distills the dominant culture and attitudes of the nineties in the U.S. using many of the strange and silly bits of culture that made it up, and in a way that makes me better understand some of the differences between Gen Xers and Millennials. I did think his structure was a bit opaque at times—I thought that clearer chapter titles and adding subtitles would have been helpful to orient me as a reader sometimes struggling to see the connections between seemingly disparate topics. I also think that his argument that the dominant culture was white culture felt like a bit of a cop-out; he touches on people of color but insists that he’s trying to cover the nineties more generally and so doesn’t focus on aspects of their “subculture.” He does integrate some references to Black music, film, and TV, but the overwhelming focus is on white American culture, which, while I understand white people dominated control of the media in the ‘90s, I think dismisses that people of different races didn’t experience the nineties in the same way. It made me wonder how different a book like this would be if written by a Black person or a member of the LGBTQ+ community, etc. I guess that’s the trouble with trying to wrap up something as complex and unwieldy as an entire decade into one book—it’s still going to be subjective. I think the counter-argument would be that this book isn’t meant to be a complete history, but rather one guy’s musings on the connections within a decade and its relationship to the present (which I did find really fascinating—the points about answering/not answering the phone really got me).  But honestly, I didn’t find it all the funny, I think because I wasn’t necessarily the intended audience (a female Zillennial), and also because sometimes the tonal shifts were very dramatic, like when he covers acts of mass violence that occurred in the decade, which I did find powerful and enlightening. Generally, I did really enjoy the reading experience but found myself stumbling over claims that seemed inaccurate from a female perspective. (Also, as an editor, I gotta say, there were a lot of typos. What can you do?)
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