BY MICHAEL MACCAMBRIDGE (Mr. MacCambridge is the author of "America's Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured A Nation )
"Eating the Dinosaur" begins by presenting a problem that most journalists would love to face: "For the past five years," Chuck Klosterman writes. "I've spent more time being interviewed than conducting interviews with other people." He then engages in a 20-page exploration of the nature of interviewing with gifted inquisitors such as documentary filmmaker Errol Morris and NPR's "This American Life" host Ira Glass. What at first seems like a self-absorbed stunt reveals itself over the course of the piece to be a thoughtful contemplation of media, truth and discourse in the modern age.

And that's what you often get with Mr. Klosterman's pixilated intelligence and vivid prose. He is too substantial to be dismissed as a shallow hipster, too idiosyncratic to be easily classified. "Everyone I've met in New York or California tells me I'm conservative," he writes. "The rest of America tells me that I'm almost comically liberal."
There are times when he dazzles, as in an essay that connects the Nirvana album "In Utero" (the certain-to- disappoint follow-up to "Nevermind") to the Branch Davidian tragedy, finding similarities between the unlikely suicidal pair Kurt Cobain and David Koresh. There are other times when Mr. Klosterman seems to be overly theoretical, such as in his essay about the ethics of time travel. His arguments are well-reasoned but do nothing to counter his concession early in the piece that "there's an inherent goofballedness in debating the ethics of an action that's impossible."

Longtime Klosterman readers cheerfully accept this mix, confident that he's going to deliver, more than once over the course of a book, an analysis that will add depth to the whirl of modern pop culture. The insight can come in long essays, such as his assessment, in the 2003 book "Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs," of the misguided furor over media bias. Or it can come in a passing aside, as in the new book, when he asks: "I mean, is Dylan a good singer or a bad singer? That's the essential question of all criticism, right?"

One of Mr. Klosterman's recurring themes is that we are so saturated by media that its sheer omnipresence not only alters our sense of reality but also prevents many of us from comprehending the degree to which that omnipresence exists. That challenge—to discern reality and truth in 21st-century America—runs throughout the collection.

The wide range of topics mirrors the big tent of American popular culture, from the lasting appeal of Abba to the annoying staying power of sit-com laugh tracks; from the nearly forgotten 1980s basketball star Ralph Sampson to Garth Brooks's critically dismissed foray into rock. Through it all, there is a cushioning empathy that has not always appeared in Mr. Klosterman's earlier work.

The essay that is most likely to disquiet some readers is his, well, not defense, actually, but . . . his extended meditation on the Unabomber's manifesto. Mr. Klosterman actually read Ted Kaczynski's full 35,000-word text and saw not the lunatic ravings of a terrorist but something more disturbing: In addition to being an attack on technological civilization, the manifesto was a trenchant media critique that strikes him as more incisive than ever in the age of the Internet. "As a species, we have never been less human than we are right now," Mr. Klosterman says. As for his thoughts about Mr. Kaczynski: "He was a bad person, but sometimes he was right."

But the collection's most compelling piece is an essay on one of the last truly mass entertainments in American culture: football. "I am thirty-seven years old," he writes. "I now like football more than I ever have. . . . I love watching it and l love thinking about it. . . . I'm just glad it's so easy to have something in my life that I enjoy this much." This simple affirmation, coming in the middle of his densely layered pop-culture criticism, has a disarming effect. It's unusual for Mr. Klosterman to be so unabashed about anything, and for longtime readers—at least those who share his football fandom—there is something touching about his earnestness.

Another media critic, Neil Postman, once argued—in the title of one of his books—that we are "amusing ourselves to death." But Mr. Klosterman's relentlessly thoughtful prose makes a case that our arts and entertainment are more suffused with meaning than ever before. Even as he's fretting over the direction of the culture, his writing stands as an eloquent defense of it.


Author(s)   Chuck Klosterman
Country   United States
Languag  English
Subject(s)  Pop culture
Publisher   Scribner
Publication date  October 20, 2009
Media type  Print (hardcover)
Pages   256
ISBN    1-4165-4420-8
OCLC Number   317923385
Eating the Dinosaur