Eating the Dinosaur
Selected Book Details
- Hardcover
- Edition: 1
- Author: Chuck Klosterman
- Publisher: Scribner
- Release Date: October 2009
- ISBN-10: 1416544208
- ISBN-13: 9781416544203
- List Price: $25.00
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryA 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
Average Rating: 
Thoughtful, entertaining, well-written
Rating:
This is the best Klosterman book to date. This collection of essays has three qualities not usually found together--they are immensely thought-provoking and meaningful, they are thoroughly entertaining, and they are very well written. This time Klosterman goes beyond just pop culture critic. He delves into some of the amazing, subtle, sublime, awful, and odd things about culture in general. The last essay alone ("FAIL") is worth getting the collection, but each essay is strong and worth reading alone. What is most remarkable about Klosterman's ideas is that they are logical and yet they seem at first glance to be insane and nonsensical. This is in my top 100 books of all time.
Irreverent Intelligence at its Finest
Rating:
I fell in love with Chuck Klosterman's seemingly infinite knowledge on all matters trivial and important when I read "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs." I did read "Chuck Klosterman IV" and was underwhelmed, but that misstep was MORE than made up for with "Eating the Dinosaur."
Bought on a whim at an LAX bookstore in preparation for an exhausting flight back to Atlanta, I wasn't aware just how amazing it would be. Klosterman's skill at comparing two UTTERLY random things in such a way that we wonder why we didn't notice it ourselves is unparalleled. Even though I may be reading about some obscure sports event I wasn't old enough to remember, or some band my parents probably didn't even listen to, the way Klosterman (often hilariously) gives them cultural significance in the most unpredictable contexts is worth the read.
Don't take the book too seriously; the best part about Klosterman is the unassuming way with which he presents his material.
Chucks best book yet
Rating:
If your a Chuck Klosterman fan then you know exactly what this book is about, if you read Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs then you already know whats in store for you. But for the people who have not read a Chuck Klosterman book then please do. Klosterman goes over just about anything you can think of from sports to time travel (which was an amazing chapter) and on from there. He shares his personal experiences and his intellect. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for someone to turn to as a friend in times like these. I also highly recommend his other books.
Kolsterman Does it Again!
Rating:
This year I decided that I would make a resolution to read more essays because it is a genre in which I am completely lacking. It is for this reason that I picked up Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman. I had read "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" when it was first published and found it rather lacking. While many reviewers found his essays to be insightful and hilarious, I found them to be littered with swears and tangential to his established thesis. Therefore, it was with great trepidation that I started this book but once I did I could not put it down! I suddenly discovered everything that reviewers had written years ago.
Basically, Klosterman has written Freakonomics for pop culture. He tackles football, basketball, Kurt Cobain, Weezer, Ralph Nader, and Don Draper all in hardcover. Perhaps the greatest testament to his book is that since reading his essays I have rethought my dislike for Kurt Cobain and all things Nirvana. On my top ten list of pop icons that I host a strong aversion to, Steven Speilberg tops off the list but Kurt Cobain comes in as a close second. However, Klosterman has made me feel compassion and understanding for Cobain. Though I still hate his music and find his fans to be some of the most obnoxious people since Jaws fans, I can now appreciate what he did for music and his role in the 1990s.
Only Klosterman can do this! He has the ability to take pop culture icons and intellectualize them which allows people who feel alienated from their generation (such as myself) to think twice about casting aside Brangelina and The Hills as insipid and unworthy of attention. It is with the perfect mixture of insight, cynicism, sarcasm, and humor that makes Klosterman one of the greatest essayists of our time.
Subjects of Klosterman's Longing Gaze
Rating:
I really liked this Klosterman. Loved Cocoa Puffs, liked 85 %, picked up IV and could only puruse it, got Dinosaurs and sped through it. His writing is fluid and convivial, repetitive in a recognizable, believably emphatic way, and funny too, which always helps. Thematically and tonaly it is clear he is growing and maturing as a modern anthrologist; more attention to sociology and philosophy; objective analysis of fame, reputation, expectation, media, character. All of these with the quirk of himself, open to his foibles and as unpretentious as someone can be when they make their living studying and commenting on others.
Klosterman has a terrific mix of expertise that allows him to comment on enough subjects to stimulate almost everyone in our society. In that way he is a "pop culture" expert, and while that is somehow soothing to me in the way that popular culture knowledge is collectively tame, it is better to see him evolving as a writer and commentator and going deeper into his subjects.
Recommended.
p.s. I didn't try to read the essays numerically: 1, 1a, 1b, 2, 3, 4, 4a, etc. I suppose there is a point to the numbering, but it didn't matter to me.
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