The Nineties ★★★★★

Read in 2025: The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman

I did not grow up in the U.S. I came here in August 2000, so technically, at the end of the nineties. Yet, like millions of others around us, the U.S. disproportionately influenced my cultural consciousness and ensuing memories of the past. It’s not like, we didn’t have significant events in India. I graduated from high school (10th grade) and junior college (12th grade), exactly in the middle of the decade, and then spent the next five years in architecture school. I got on the Internet in late 1996 and the world shrank instantly.

Everything that happened in the U.S. was no longer days or weeks away from us hearing about it. It was almost in real-time be it the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, the Oklahoma City bombing, or the horrific Columbine High shooting. Klosterman examines each event that we now remember hazily with a cultural and historical lens - how it seemed at that time and how we remember it now. We weren’t tuned in to the live telecast of the OJ (slow) car chase or the LA riots but we were aware of its implications. We enjoyed Friends, Baywatch, Frasier, and other sitcoms in real-time and caught up on older ones like M*A*S*H, Street Hawk, Newhart, Wonder Years, or whatever the sole cable provider chose to deign us  capable of understanding. But toward the end of the decade, we were all caught up and finally enjoying TV and movies with the rest of America. Titanic was just as big in India as it was in the U.S. 

In a way, Klosterman’s book helped me finally relive those significant 90s events and remember them while also exploring why they were so important. Each chapter was like, “Oh yeah! I remember that” and “Oooh! That’s why it was such a big deal.” 

If you are a Gen-Xer, go pick up a copy and enjoy nostalgia because they don’t make it like that anymore.