X Saves the World How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

by Gordinier, Jeff

• ISBN13: 9780670018581
• ISBN10: 0670018589
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-03-27
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

A shrewd and hilarious call to arms for the generation that fell between the cracks Jammed in between the garish showboating of the baby boomers and the tabloid- trash stunts of the millennials, the discerning generation that gave us Yahoo! and Nirvana has been quietly and inexorably changing the face of American culture. The men and women who came of age in the era of Lollapalooza have been underrepresented for too long in pop sociology, but reporter and essayist Jeff Gordinier argues that it’s time for the slackers to rise up and take charge. Taking off from his controversial Details essay Has Generation X Already Peaked?” Gordinier takes the reader along on an enthralling, eye-opening journey—from the expatriate garrets of Prague to the amped-up offices of dot-com San Francisco, from the muddy fields of Woodstock ’94 to the celebrity-obsessed media machine of Us Weekly—in his quest to find the essence of X. Along the way he shows how Gen X innovations in art, comedy, technology, activism, and (gasp!) business have come to define the way we live now. A proud, accomplished, and unrepentant X-er, Jeff Gordinier writes with insight and biting wit about the generation that time forgot—and makes a convincing case for Gen X as maybe, secretly, the greatest generation” of all. Like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffsand The Tipping Point, X Saves the Worldflips conventional wisdom on its head and expertly captures the spirit of a strange and crucial era in American society.

Author Biography

Jeff Gordinier is the editor at large of Details magazine. His work has appeared in Esquire, GQ, Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times, as well as in the Best American Nonrequired Reading and Best Creative Nonfiction anthologies.

Table of Contents

A Disclaimer
Introduction: Check Your Head
Quick First-Person Tangent: Celebrated Summer 1984	p. 1
In Bloom: 1991-1999: Rise & Fall	p. 5
Idiots Rule: 2000-2006: Sucking	p. 85
Intermission: To Hell With Poverty 2006	p. 101
I Will Dare: 2006-Present: Not Sucking	p. 105
Acknowledgements	p. 171
Index	p. 181
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.