The Nineties

The 1990s feel closer than they are. The decade opened with the fall of the Berlin Wall and closed with the run-up to the attacks of September 11, and in between came two elections that turned, in different ways, on third-party figures: Ross Perot and Ralph Nader. Landlines gave way to cell phones, the internet took off, and popular culture moved at a furious pace without the digital archives that now remember everything. Chuck Klosterman argues that this was the last period with a true mainstream, something people could either join or push against.

In The Nineties, Klosterman looks back at the decade through its movies, music, sports and television, along with its politics before 9/11 and the shifting attitudes toward race, class and sexuality. He also sets figures such as Oprah Winfrey and Alan Greenspan side by side as opposing forces shaping the era. Rather than offering a straight chronology, he pulls these threads together into one wide-ranging account of how people lived and thought.

The tone is funny, sharp and curious. Klosterman, who also wrote But What If We're Wrong, treats the decade as a turning point in how people experience the world, one whose effects are still being worked out. Readers who lived through it will recognize their own memories, and younger readers will get a lively explanation of how the present took shape.