Product Description

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 Puffs and The Tipping Point, X Saves the World flips conventional wisdom on its head and expertly captures the spirit of a strange and crucial era in American society.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #289553 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-27
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Nostalgia for the attitudes and culture of the early to mid-'90s looms large in Gordinier's entertaining book-length argument for the greatness of Generation X. Gordinier does not have warm sentiments toward the baby boomers or the current wanna-wanna generation of celebrity worshippers, preferring instead the self-effacing, conflictedly ambitious heroes of the '90s, like Kurt Cobain and Richard Linklater, who were not enthralled by the concept of changing the world. Gordinier has an easygoing style and a comprehensive knowledge of pop culture gleaned from a career writing for Entertainment Weekly and editing Details magazine, and this might be the reason the book sometimes feels like a collection of essays. Sequences on the rise of Nirvana and the burst of the dot-com bubble are ably narrated. And Gordinier does find a fresh perspective in discussions of recent phenomena such as YouTube and American Idol and their relationship to Generation X. (Mar. 31)
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Review
“I loved this book…it’s impassioned, very quick on its feet, dense with all the right allusions, funny, and in the end, actually very moving.”
—Nick Hornby, The Believer

"I think Jeff Gordinier might be the secret love child of Tom Wolfe and Douglas Coupland. This book is a fascinating, thought-provoking and funny look at America today. It's about more than Gen X, it's about everyone."
--A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically

"This is the passionate defense that our much-maligned generation deserves."
--Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad

"X Saves the World is a great read-fast, funny and incisive. It's a thrill watching Jeff Gordinier spin his extensive cultural Rolodex and if I weren't so ironic and detached myself, I'd suggest anointing him the new voice of our generation-in-exile."
--Jess Walter, author of The Zero

"When future archeologists recover the artifacts from our failed civilization, may they at least find some reference to the forgotten sliver of a generation chronicled here, who dared to consider - even just consider - whether doing something other than selling out was a viable option."
-- Douglas Rushkoff, author of Coercion

"As a boomer through and through, I was skeptical: a bunch of 35- to 45-year olds formally famous for their most excellent slacking could now save art, music, and activism from the corporate monoculture? But in this passionate, beautifully written ode to the generation that even stereotypes forgot, Jeff Gordinier has made me believe."
--Leslie Savan, author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers

"As a Marine, I hate slackers. As an X-er, I hate manifestos. As an MBA, I hate jokes. This is a slacker manifesto filled with jokes. But it doesn't suck. In fact, it's pretty great."
--Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away

About the Author
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.

Customer Reviews

X hits the spot
It's hard to be brief about reviewing the best recent book on Generation X. Gordinier's book is an update on the adult Xer and his forgotten place between the narcissistic Boomers and the clueless Generation Y--whom Karen McCullough labels as a group with a "much higher self-esteem than their abilities". Gordinier's book bluntly captures the essence of Generation X transitioning from its last coming-of-age moments in the 90s to its entrepreneurial spirit which brought influenced artistic alternative music and movies, the dot-com boom, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Napster, Youtube, and Google.

Gordinier's writing smacks of sarcasm and in-your-face rhetoric, which is both honest and entertaining. His vocabulary and pop allusions are for those of us who are part of his Xer world. If not, see you you later. Gordinier's writing is a brief dip into nostalgic "Cooler King Moments" such as the arrival of Nirvana. It also lambasts the Boomers at Woodstalk '94 with descriptive passages, and recently their immersion into recycled Beatles nostalgia in Las Vegas. Gordinier also clarifies what it means to recognize kitsch--borrowing on the Czech struggles for freedom in the late 80s.

The first half of the book calls to me, as if it were my finally-discovered anthem. It is an instant classic, starting with the author's 1984 job at Laguna Beach selling ice cream and testing the awareness of tourists with indie alternative music. Pure hilarity! There are other anecdotes and moments that also pique the reader's interests, such as the bookend to the Xer's youth: an escape symbolically depicted with a 1999 Volkswagen Cabrio commercial to the tune of "Pink Moon." Gordinier's scene of a simple South Park neighborhood in San Francisco at the height of the dot-com boom is eerie.

However, the second half of the book begins to lag as the author seems to search for answers to his book's thesis. He uses trite examples such as a poetry bus, subsistence gardening, and a self-conscious and frustrating view of the Bush years. His language loses its luster and instead becomes preachy. Gordinier still makes fine observations, but some of them are politcally motivated--such as alluding to Barack Obama as representing the Xer cause (and forgetting that Obama's poetic rhetoric has yet to produce any kind of ideas or practical solutions that appeal to Xers. There is nothing to suggest that he will relate to the self-sufficient spirit of the Xer). Gordinier does provide one more humourous scene in which alternative artist, Moby, encounters a futuristically fried Brittney Spears. It's worth the moment.

Overall: 5/5 stars for the first half and 3/5 stars for the second half. The books is still worthy of 4 1/2 stars for its refreshing observations, its defiant tone and wit, and its dip into nostalgia. And even if my views are not necessarily one with Gordinier's, I give him credit for attempting to provide solutions for the dismal aspects of our society. I'll take that anyday over a politician's poetic nonsense and rhetoric.

X Rocks The World
This book is a breath of fresh syntax & cultural analytic.
Gordinier's ability to truly nail certain key moments in the zeitgeist
and make them sing again is wicked good;
whether the tune is happy sad (the moment Nirvana broke)
or just plain gutter tragic (baby hit me one more time).
Gordinier lifts the curtain on obvious truths
that are only obvious once he reveals them.
I love deceptively simple artistic revelations,
and X is chock full of them.
Highly recommended unless you're a millennial, of course,
but then again, you would be too busy taking self portraits for your myspace page to read this in the first place.

X-cellent
Having read the brilliantly cranky Details magazine piece that inspired the book, I figured Gordinier's full-length screed would be smart, really funny and bursting with intentionally button-pushing opinion. And it is. What I didn't expect is an ending that knocked me backwards with its hopefulness, embodied, in Gordinier's weirdly synaptic thinking, by the image of James Brown's battered knees. It's an amazing and moving leap. Highly recommended.