Klosterman never fails to be an incredibly engaging read. If you’ve enjoyed his cultural criticism and essays in the past (or maybe even if you haven’t), if you’re a child of the 90s you’re going to love this. Great, great work.

I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Klosterman writing was done very well and this book covered a wide range of topics within the 90s. Examples are phones, foods, music, sports, Michael Jordan, Clinton, Tv shows (Friends, Seinfeld), and more. There were parts that felt dragged and or rambled. Almost like this was a textbook. However, there were also many interesting parts/ that kept me entertained to continue reading.

3.5 ⭐️

Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group The Penguin press for this ebook for an honest review.

I found Chuck Klosterman's writing style to be pretentious and it quickly got old. Unfortunately, I didn't finish this book because I lost interest in his style.

I was really looking forward to this one. As someone who grew up in the nineties, I was incredibly eager to read this and experience this.
Unfortunately, it was incredibly dull and not at all what I thought it was going to be. With that said, someone else may very well stumble upon this and find it exactly what you want.

This was a very interesting expose into the Nineties, but unlike Klostermans other books, I was not super enticed and it took me awhile to get through.

This was a super fun and nostalgic read, definitely a first purchase for all collections across libraries

Just as good as everything else he writes. Covers history and culture in an entertaining, illumination fashion.

I normally enjoy Chuck Klosterman titles, but this one did not do it for me. Mr. Klosterman does enjoy swimming in nostalgia often however, this time I found parts boring, spiteful, and/or a retread of something I have seen online well before reading the book. If you enjoy his other books, you will probably enjoy this title.

Chuck Klosterman does it again. I read anything that he writes and I am never disappointed. This book brings back memories of life in my younger years. Highly recommend.

As someone who grew up in the 90's, this book definitely brought me back to my childhood in a good way. Great read!

Despite all the good press I just could not get into this read. May try again later when the mood is right for nostalgia

Chuck Klosterman creates another entertaining book that looks at seminal events in the 1990s and shows how we were wrong about them. It's both a fun, highly readable novel told with Klosterman's inimitable voice, while also a stark social commentary on the way our minds misremember our failures.

Chuck Klosterman returns with more essays on popular culture. This time, he focuses on the 1990s.

While I remember the 1990s, Chuck Klosterman brought some new things to light that I wasn't aware of (like how Generation X got its name). Because of its length, it took me a bit longer to read than an average book, but as I am a fun of Mr. Klosterman's, it was well worth it.

To be fair, Chuck Klosterman is possibly my favorite active writer, so I knew what I was expecting. At the same time, I am not totally unbiased and can be critical if I feel the need. This book, however, is Klosterman at his best. His ability to situate historical events in a modern context is top-notch. If this ends up being the defining piece for the decade, the recollection of the past will be as safe as it could be. I suspect Klosterman would strive for nothing less.

As someone who was in elementary school for the 90's I found this title so interesting. I could remember some of the things/events that were brought up but really enjoyed reading about them as an adult.

Two things first. One – this is the first book by Klosterman I’ve read. Two – I, like Klosterman, am firmly a Gen X-er. I graduated high school in ’93, college in ’97. I got married in ’99 and had Amber in 2000 (which counts because Klosterman doesn’t consider the ’90s officially over until 9/11). If I’m an adult, that was the decade I became one. I don’t know if you have to be a member of my generation to enjoy The Nineties, but I’m sure it helps.

If it was part of the culture during the ’90s, it’s in here: Nirvana, Reality Bites, American Beauty, Pulp Fiction, Seinfeld, Friends, Columbine, Mike Tyson, Tiger Woods, the Clintons, Dolly, Garth Brooks, Clarence Thomas. It covers TV shows I watched, bands I listened to and rappers I didn’t, news stories that feel different when you look back at them than they did at the time. Klosterman talks about why the person and/or event seemed so significant at the time, and whether that significance has carried through to the present day or not. He talks about the attitudes of the era. He discusses some events that were seen as positive then but have not aged well. It was a fun combination of a nostalgic walk down memory lane and reassessing how I viewed things then and now.

I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I still listen to Lithium on Sirius XM and made Amber watch Pulp Fiction and From Dawn till Dusk at the drive-in last year, so take my opinion for what it’s worth.

I totally enjoyed reading this book. The cover alone was enough for me to want to read it. I myself a high schooler and graduating in the early nineties can remember my phone just like the one on the cover. I can remember before call waiting and yelling at everyone to not get on the phone since I was expecting a phone call. It's interesting to read and reminisce about those days. This was the first book I have read of Chuck Klosterman but I am now interested to read more. His writing was clever, witty, and chucklesome at times. Did I agree with everything he said, absolutely not but it did not make his writing or his pop culture and grunge references any different. I loved the nineties. We were not fully attached to technology and it didn't control us but yet it did. I wanted to be home to watch Dallas, Seinfield, Friends, 90210 and many other shows. I can remember when we got our first VCR that recorded. There is no telling how many mix tapes we made either. I also remember the Clinton/Bush election and the debates in school. I remember the OJ Bronco chase and trial as well as the Columbine Shooting. I also remember receiving most of our news by newspapers and the only way to find someones number was a phone book.

Do I think the nineties were a signpost to signify where we were going or would end up in 2022, I'm not sure. I think the nineties were actually a simplified time that was way less complicated. Some of the most of important decisions were what time we got home to watch certain shows because we would have to wait for a rerun. Did the things that occurred in the nineties change the way we think and act? Again, not sure but I know I would go back to those days and enjoy every minute. I think like most non-fiction books, it's not my place to debate whether he is right or wrong. Did I enjoy his story and perspective. Absolutely. While it seems like I graduated forever ago, it was really just 30 years and life has certainly changed in that time. His viewpoint is amusing and intriguing.

Thank you Netgalley and Penguin Press for the opportunity to read and give an honest review of this book.

The 90s had so many interesting twists and turns throughout the years looking back at pop culture, entertainment, sports, politics and society in general. This book was a great look back at the time in a unique perspective worth exploring.

The satellite radio player in my car has ten presets. The station in the primo #1 slot is the indie rock station, but that’s mostly aspirational: the two most-played stations in this particular automobile are 90s On 9 and Lithium, your source for “Nineties Alternative And Grunge.”

And yet, even as someone born in 1979 who remembers the nineties in rich detail and who spends probably too much time reliving them, I was blown away by the depth, breadth, and insight of the material in The Nineties. This is, of course, par for the course for author Chuck Klosterman, whose work, from his music reviews for Spin to his sports journalism for the late, lamented Grantland to his “low culture manifesto” Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, is scholarly in its aims and encyclopedic in its completeness yet never as dry as all that would seem to imply thanks to Klosterman’s tone—wry, witty, and cutting when called for without being snarky.

From the opening chapter “Fighting the Battle of Who Could Care Less” (get it?) to the penultimate “I Feel the Pain of Everyone, Then I Feel Nothing” (get it?? It’s a Dinosaur Jr. reference and a Bill Clinton reference), Klosterman delves into the nineties not just as a decade, but as the defining era of Generation X—the slacker generation whose experience was informed, as Klosterman puts it, by “an adversarial relationship with the unseemliness of trying too hard.”


Each of the book’s twelve chapters summarizes a particular overarching topic, within which Klosterman dives into the details with vignettes about various news events and pop culture oddities, always explaining them with enough depth to make sense to the uninitiated while offering a fascinating new perspective to the already familiar. At hand throughout are his two greatest strengths as a writer: the ability to offer specific examples that instantaneously, ingeniously sum up a broad concept in a way you’ve never considered before, and pithy one-liners that cut to the quick. Case in point, on grunge, he can go deep—“Down-tuned bands of the nineties were more interested in recapturing the fuzzy sound of the seventies, and really just the distorted anti-pop center of those particular years (a combination of Black Sabbath in ‘73 and Neil Young in ‘78).” Or more succinctly: “Grunge, by a wide margin, was the most morbid genre in pop history.”

Beyond grunge, all the usual suspects are present, both the good and the bad—the meta comedy of Seinfeld, the referential filmmaking of Quentin Tarantino, the presidency of Bill Clinton, the discourse around political correctness, the Persian Gulf War, the Oklahoma City bombing, Waco, the murders of Tupac and Biggie, O.J. Simpson, Columbine, and much, much more. But even in these well-worn topics, Klosterman finds new ground, primarily by tying these past events into modern society—the way, for example, that the 24-hour news cycle meant that the coverage of violent incidents (like Oklahoma City and Columbine) often led with information that turned out to be wrong, and how that led to the erosion of faith in the accuracy of news that is only exacerbated today. Some of his connections seem a bit far-fetched—his theory of how the Republican Party would have prevented its hard shift to the right had Ross Perot not entered the 1992 presidential race is a little Charlie-Day-explaining-his-yarn-map— but then others, like how it’s not hard to draw a line between the hunky, aspirational conspiracy theorizing of Fox Mulder on The X-Files and the litany of nonsense that controls the public discourse today, seem downright profound.

Scattered throughout are a greatest hits package of mostly/entirely forgotten nineties tidbits—Biosphere 2! Dolly the cloned sheep! The TV show Studs! Klosterman is most at home when digging deep into pop culture ephemera—movies like Reality Bites, Kids, In the Company of Men, American Beauty (and how the discourse about white privilege has lessened its standing in the ensuing decades), and American History X (“an antiracist film that could potentially be enjoyed by a racist”); the clear beverage craze; the inevitability of Pauly Shore’s fame at the time and the inconceivability of that fact in hindsight. One of the best portions of the book is an essay on the differing reactions to and treatment of Alanis Morrissette and Liz Phair and how it serves as a summary of the state of feminism in the nineties. Klosterman’s writing throughout is impeccable, so imminently quotable that I struggled to keep this review from turning into one long string of excerpts. For a historical primer of an era not that far in the review mirror, I don’t know how it could get much better than this. | Jason Green

Click here to read an excerpt of The Nineties, courtesy of Penguin Press.

This book was pure nostalgia for me. I graduated high school in 1999 and I could relate to so much presented in this wonderfully researched trip down memory lane.

I feel that even other generations will enjoy this read though because the author does an excellent job of defining and categorizing a time in history that was filled with so many changes.

Great read! Highly recommend!