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Eating the Dinosaur
by Chuck Klosterman
| List Price: |
$25.00 |
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$16.50 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
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$8.50 (34%) |
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Hardcover
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN13: 9781416544203
Condition: NEW
Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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.
| Customer Reviews: |
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| Pop Culture Perfection! |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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My friend John recommended this book to me and I ordered it immediately. John is one of those guys who is smarter than most people, and he has an outstanding knowledge of literature, pop culture, and sports. I enjoy discussing opinions on 2 out of 3 of those topics, but I still don't know what a running back does that differs him from a linebacker. After finishing this book, I understand why John enjoyed it--Klosterman is a doppelganger for John, an expert on all three of these areas.
Eating the Dinosaur is a collection of 13 essays about modern life discussed in terms of popular culture. Klosterman is the uber-hipster with a writing style that is sharp, funny, and biting. Here are some of my favorites:
"Oh, the Guilt" connects Nirvana's Kurt Cobain's and David Koresh's messiah complexes.
"Tomorrow Rarely Knows" is one of the best discussions on time travel that I've read.
"ABBA 1, World 0" about the phenomenon of ABBA Music
" `Ha ha,' he said. `Ha ha.' " discusses what the laugh track on sitcoms says about its viewers and our culture.
"FAIL" gives insight into the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski that I never before considered.
The power of this book is not reading about topics that I enjoy (advertising, Lost, time travel), but also about those subjects in which I usually steer clear from in choosing my literary selections. He has two essays that are sports related, one about Ralph Sampson and one about football. It was the longest piece dedicated to football plays that I've ever read..and I enjoyed it. The next time I talk to John, I'm going to discuss the feasibility of the 4-3 and Wildcat plays, and how the forward pass changed the face of football for good.
In the Ted Kaczynski piece, Klosterman offers this conclusion of the effects of technology that coincide with the Unabomber's views:
Technology is bad for civilization. We are living in a manner that is unnatural. We are latently enslaved by our own ingenuity, and we have unknowingly constructed a simulated world. The benefits of technology are easy to point out (medicine, transportation, the ability to send and receive text messages during Michael Jackson's televised funeral), but they do not compensate for the overall loss of humanity that is its inevitable consequence. As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now. And that (evidently) is what I want.
This is a clever collection of essays that will be worth your time to read.
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| Hard to Describe |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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This was the first book I have read from this author, and I didn't know anything about him before that. The book itself is hard to describe, because Klosterman's essays are all "about" something like ABBA, but what they're about is not what the actual subject is. For instance, the essay about ABBA is not about ABBA's music, it's about the way ABBA has transcended the way people normally think about popular music. Each section of the book has a kind of twist like that, which made it interesting enough for me to read the book all the way through, but I have to admit that I had zero interest in any of the subjects that he chose. Time travel? Really?
Also, I did not agree with at least half of Klosterman's statements, and many of them can be easily refuted. With just a little bit of thought, I could come up with arguments to a lot of his claims. He makes broad generalizations throughout the book about what people want or what people like, that simply didn't ring true for me. Maybe that's what *he* thinks people want or like, but it's not necessarily the truth.
I also found the little bits between sections, where questions are proposed and answered, to be pretentious to the point of being silly. What are they there for? It didn't make sense to me. He comes across as a condescending nerd at times.
That being said, I think Klosterman has an engaging style of writing, and some of his ideas were new to me. He got me to read an entire book about subjects I have no interest in, so he must be pretty good, right? I think I will read something else of his to see how he holds up.
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| Dinosaur Yumm Seconds |
| Customer Rating: 5 out of 5 |
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Klosterman is insightful..entertaining..writes in a style that connects to the reader as if he is talking to you directly...Essays are varying and although you might not be able to relate to everyone theres something worth reading inside of it. Some parts are funny, some make you think, and some are part genius. 1st Klosterman book and eager to see what else he has written I have become a fan and would recommend to all.
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| Thirteen new pop culture essays |
| Customer Rating: 3 out of 5 |
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Chuck Klosterman's new collection of pop culture essays resembles his previous books "Fargo Rock City", "Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs", "Killing Yourself to Live" and "IV". Though Klosterman's usual topic is music, my favorite two essays were the two about sports: "What We Talk About When We Talk About Ralph Sampson" and "Football". I am not a Garth Brooks fan but I enjoyed reading "The Passion of the Garth" about Brooks' unusual Chris Gaines project. "Oh, the Guilt" explored the pre-release hype surrounding Nirvana's "In Utero" but little of the actual album, and the comparisons between Kurt Cobain and David Koresh seemed awkward. The thirteen essays span only 230 pages. This page count is padded by self-interview Q&A pages between essays and large obtuse section labels within each essay ("1", "2A", etc.). Klosterman offers some interesting ideas and entertaining prose, but the sum is underwhelming considering the $25 hardcover list price. I'd recommend any of his earlier non-fiction compilations ahead of this mediocre new volume.
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| It took foreever |
| Customer Rating: 4 out of 5 |
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the book came in great shape, but it seemed like it look forever to make it to my home.
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