This book is an historical account of the nineties in the United States, with a special focus on popular culture, politics and technology. The writer explains that taking a precise slice of 1990-1999 doesn’t fully explain how we got to this decade and so some events from the 80’s and the 2000’s are included to provide perspective.
Before reading this book I didn’t really have any special feeling about the 90’s. I felt like I grew up in the 70’s, I remember the 80’s as my junior high and high school days, but I realized after reading this that like the author, the 90’s were the time were I was just entering the world as an adult. This was the time that I was really trying to establish things like my career, my ambitions, serious relationships, etc. In that sense, the 90’s certainly were an important time for me.
The most important point I got out of this book was that people of my generation for the most part are the only generation to really remember life before the internet and also be able to live modern life with the internet. There are certainly older generations that lived most of their life without the internet but it seems like most of them could live with or without it. The book points out all the things that have changed thanks to the internet, mobile phone technology, and detachment from the living room television as a source of news/entertainment. Especially the idea that before the internet if you missed some event on TV or radio, you missed it. VCRs just started appearing in the 90’s and that started to change the way we think about media.
The author really goes deep in analyzing popular culture, and this wasn’t as interesting for me. Major cultural events are detailed, and I don’t think I was the target of these since I remembered them well. The OJ Simpson trial, the election showdown between Bush and Gore, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings – all of these are presented here and I didn’t really feel like there was much new information for me, except to review them from a modern perspective.
For me this book started out quite interesting but the analysis was a little too detailed – giving labels to certain things as “post-modern” or labeling or categorizing things from that generation with modern definitions… I didn’t get a lot out of these exercises.
Still, it provided a brief flashback to my formative years, and made me think that I wasn’t really putting much thought into what was happening at the time. Overall, it was worth reading the book.
Next I am reading The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
