- Category: Books » Art Books » Popular Culture - General
- Format: Hardcover Learn more about the Hardcover format using Tower WIKI.
- Publisher: Scribner Book Company
- Number of Pages: 256
- ISBN: 1416544208
- WAPI (Tower ID): 113396257
- Release Date: October 20, 2009
- Average Customer Review: There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review!
- Tower.com Sales Rank: #157 in Books (See Top 100 Books Bestsellers)
- #1 in Art Books (See Top 100 Art Books Bestsellers)
- #1 in Popular Culture - General (See Top 100 Popular Culture - General Bestsellers)
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Product DescriptionMore Books by Chuck Klosterman (Author)Run a Quick Search on "Eating the Dinosaur" by Chuck Klosterman to Browse Related Products:Browse more products related to "Eating the Dinosaur"Browse more products related to "Chuck Klosterman"Review"Klosterman's trick is to use stupid-sounding subjects as grist for smart, funny essays....[He] performs literary high-wire acts with his essays: they're great when he succeeds, but things hit with a thud when he missteps. He mostly succeeds in this book....The essays in this book are like guitar solos by his beloved Eddie Van Halen. They show exceptional talent and are original. They can soar, and part of the fun is trying to guess where they'll end up." "The book feels more mature than SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS, while still keeping to Klosterman's signature style of making absurd statements like 'Britney Spears is paid less than she deserves,' and going on to justify his claims....[Klosterman's] work is still peppered with unexplained references only sensible to someone as music-savvy as him, as well as allusions that will be just as confusing in 10 years. But the end product seems likely to age better. It isn't a low-culture manifesto, it's a personal one." "Mr. Klosterman's relentlessly thoughtful prose makes a case that our arts and entertainment are more suffused with meaning than ever before. Even as he's fretting over the direction of the culture, his writing stands as an eloquent defense of it." "Klosterman's essays are still both witty and clever, not least the chapter he devotes to exploring the lack of irony that bonds three otherwise very different cultural figures: Ralph Nader, Werner Herzog, and Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo." "Funny, irreverent and fascinating....[Klosterman's] best collection of writing since his breakthrough, SEX, DRUGS, AND COCOA PUFFS." Publisher's noteThe best-selling author of Downtown Owl and Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs takes a humorous look at expectations versus reality in pop culture, sports, and media, in a book that explores such questions as: Why is pop culture obsessed with time travel?; What do Kurt Cobain and David Koresh have in common?; and much more. A Book of All-New Pop Culture Pieces by Chuck Klosterman Chuck Klosterman has chronicled rock music, film, and sports for almost fifteen years. He's covered extreme metal, extreme nostalgia, disposable art, disposable heroes, life on the road, life through the television, urban uncertainty and small-town weirdness. Through a variety of mediums and with a multitude of motives, he's written about everything he can think of (and a lot that he's forgotten). The world keeps accelerating, but the pop ideas keep coming. In "Eating the Dinosaur," Klosterman is more entertaining and incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality, and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny. Q: What is this book about? A: Well, that's difficult to say. I haven't read it yet - I've just clicked on it and casually glanced at this webpage. There clearly isn't a plot. I've heard there's a lot of stuff about time travel in this book, and quite a bit about violence and Garth Brooks and why Germans don't laugh when they're inside grocery stores. Ralph Nader and Ralph Sampson play significant roles. I think there are several pages about Rear Window and football and "Mad Men" and why Rivers Cuomo prefers having sex with Asian women. Supposedly there's a chapter outlining all the things the Unabomber was right about, but perhaps I'm misinformed. Q: Is there a larger theme? A: Oh, something about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually happened. Q: Should I read this book? A: Probably. Do you see a clear relationship between the Branch Davidian disaster and the recording of Nirvana's "In Utero"? Does Barack Obama make you want to drink Pepsi? Does ABBA remind you of AC/DC? If so, you probably don't need to read this book. You probably wrote this book. But I suspect everybody else will totally love it, except for the ones who absolutely hate it. AnnotationPop culture guru Chuck Klosterman comes as close to a magnum opus as he is likely to compose with this collection of essays which chart the ethereal distances between present events and our media-guided memory of them. Klosterman name-drops an amalgam of seemingly random icons and has-beens of music, film, sports, and politics (Ralph Sampson, Garth Brooks, Alfred Hitchcock, Kurt Cobain, The Unabomber), and then uses his unique form of mental magnetism to map their hidden, but significant connections. As the pages rise and descend, from right to left, Klosterman's cultural convergences accumulate and accelerate, such that, like his subjects, his disparate essays coalesce, revealing structure and a master plan, as he identifies our tendency to cherish mass exaggerated versions of reality over individual experience. If You Enjoy "Eating the Dinosaur (Hardcover)", May We Also Recommend:
Customer Reviews for "Eating the Dinosaur (Hardcover)" by Chuck Klosterman (Author)There are no customer reviews yet. Be the first to write a review! Popular Culture - General Bestsellers
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