A collection of essays about the nineties whose reportage appears to start and end at "the author fondly remembers his childhood and then also Googles some stuff" and whose thesis appears to start and end at "the nineties were very unique and cool, unlike everything that came before and after".

By one hour into the book I had begrudgingly accepted the idea that this was not going to be a serious work and would instead be a handful of podcast-level essays; even that low bar was not met, and I had to give up halfway between the work. I am hard-pressed to say what specific error broke the camel's back: was it the author purporting that the nineties were the only time in which artists were criticized for a prior life as a child actor (Klosterman explicitly calls out Drake as an example of that not happening today, which: ???); was it the author's contention that Dazed and Confused was meant to be a biting satire of the seventies (????). I don't think so: I think it was the acceptance after the sixth essay that none of Chuck's wandering reminiscences were going to have any sort of meaningful point or thesis besides a nostalgia for a world which he found comfortable and familiar.

And I don't blame him for that. I liked the little bit of the nineties that I remember. But this is not a book about the nineties: it was a book about the things how a white dude in 1996 spent his time (the internet! the Bulls! Friends!) and that just does not make for compelling content.

★★