Eating the Dinosaur »

A popular Esquire columnist and all-around pop culture fanatic, Chuck Klosterman overanalyzes everything -- from the cultural significance of The Sims to Billy Joel's greatness level -- in essay collections like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Chuck Klosterman IV.

"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 fans 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.

The New York Times - Gregory Beyer

In the course of the collection's 13 essays, Klosterman burrows into overexposed but underexplored departments of American pop culture. Declaring himself "post-taste," he evaluates not the merits of certain phenomena but the ways we "use" them.

Something Instead of Nothing 1

Oh, the Guilt 25

Tomorrow Rarely Knows 51

What We Talk About When We Talk About Ralph Sampson 69

Through a Glass, Blindly 89

The Passion of the Garth 103

"The Best Response" 117

Football 125

ABBA 1, World 0 147

"Ha ha," he said. "Ha ha." 161

It Will Shock You How Much It Never Happened 177

T Is for True 191

FAIL 213

Acknowledgments 231

Index 233