Still, I wanted to know more about his 1990s. With The Nineties, Klosterman removes himself almost entirely, allowing him to tell a more universal story of how the decade was understood as it unfolded. His 2003 best-seller, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, essentially serves as a ’90s memoir, with personal essays on The Real World, Saved by the Bell, and other totems of the era. A nostalgia-laced memoir The Nineties is not, which may surprise or even disappoint those who know only the author’s earlier works, among them Fargo Rock City and Killing Yourself to Live, which delivered a highly approachable blend of autobiography and pop critique. What’s noticeably absent from Klosterman’s twelfth book is Klosterman himself. For more than 300 pages, he covers the waning years of the 20th century: Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, Seinfeld and Friends, “Achy Breaky Heart” and Garth Brooks, Michael Jordan the baseball player and Pauly Shore the movie star, the slow, steady creep of the web and “the slow cancellation of the future”-the dispiriting notion that our post-internet world is unable to produce genuinely new culture, only recycled versions from the past. It’s the same conclusion Klosterman lands on in The Nineties, a fairly straightforward history of the American decade enlivened by his exceptional ability to draw unexpected insights from mass culture.
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