Book-It '10! Book #24
The Fifty Books Challenge, year two! This was a library request.
Title: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture by Nathan Rabin
Details: Copyright 2009, Scribner
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "As a child and teenager, Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. Today, pop culture is his life. For more than a decade, he's served as head writer for A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. In The Big Rewind, Rabin shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story. From a psilocybin-addled trip to the Anne Frank House to having focus groups for his movie-review panel show opine that all the male critics seemed "gay" and that the show as a whole was "too gay," Rabin discusses his personal evolution in prose as hilarious as it is unexpectedly poignant.
Using a specific song, album, book, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his heartwarming tale of triumph over adversity® with biting wit and unwise candor. The pop culture touchstones Rabin uses here reflect his broad frame of reference with comic dissertations on The Simpsons, The Catcher in the Rye, Dr. Dre, Grey Gardens, The Great Gatsby, the Magnetic Fields, the uncanny parallels between Ol' Dirty Bastard and John F. Kennedy, and how the stock market mirrors the pimp game.
Rabin writes movingly about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment -- throughout a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. The Big Rewind is also a touching narrative of a motherless child's search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin's lovable, hard-luck dad.
Featuring cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and Barack Obama, The Big Rewind chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin's life and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I enjoy The AV Club and Nathan Rabin especially for his particularly amusing "My Year of Flops" columns.
How I Liked It: I really wanted to like this book. It was almost market-tested towards my sensibilities (particularly given many of the pop culture references) and the book declares after the opening quotes (by Gene Kelly's Don Lockwood and pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson, respectively)
THIS MACHINE GENTLY SCOLDS FASCISTS.
Despite my misgivings about books by magazine writers (or bloggers) who are generally tolerable only in article length, Rabin holds his own, weaving pop culture into memoir as easily as promised by the descriptions. While the book is a little rocky from not quite deciding what it is (a David Sedarisesque series of stories? A jet black comedy? A bitter exorcism of Rabin's past?) or trying to be too many things at once, it manages fairly well until the last few chapters where Rabin gets to talking about his ill-fated stint as a film critic on the panel of a low-rated basic cable show. His recollections of celebrities don't forward the plot, his backbiting of his fellow cast-members comes across as petty and the narrator from the earlier chapters of the book seems to disappear altogether. Call it time, maybe: the wounds (if you want to call them that) of his television career were and are only a few years old, a time most memoirs address as "the present". The last chapter is an awkward type of love letter to Roger Ebert (who blurbs the back of the book; in an interview Rabin recalls sending him a copy, telling him it featured him prominently) and a kind of clumsy attempt to tie the entire book together.
Maybe the problem does lie singly with Rabin's timing: he's completing this memoir as he is coming into his greatest fame yet however, the memoirs of a troubled upbringing could stand alone. Essentially, he has several angles he's trying to work, including an urge to destigmatize mental illness (Rabin suffers from Depression and is hospitalized as a teen), and it's almost impossible for them to all work together.
Rabin's book may suffer occasionally from an identity crisis similiar to his own and may teeter off at the end, but it's still an interesting read and a must for any AV Club fan.
Notable: The back cover is blurbed by Rich Dahm, co-executive producer of The Colbert Report. In Rabin's recounting the pop culture accomplishments of the Jewish people as he considers his heritage "cultural as well as religious", he notes
"It's Jon Stewart making sense of an insane world on a daily basis." (pg 8)
Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart (among friends, family, and other entertainers, including The Critic television show and "the People Under the Stairs song 'July 3rd'") are thanked in the Acknowledgments section.
Upon entering the group home as an adolescent, Rabin notes that one occupant's parents "seemingly emerged whole cloth from an early John Waters movie." (pg 66)
In the last chapter of the book, Rabin discusses his history untangling before him in a number of film mediums, including Odorama.
My god, are my favorite reference points that transparent?
Title: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture by Nathan Rabin
Details: Copyright 2009, Scribner
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "As a child and teenager, Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. Today, pop culture is his life. For more than a decade, he's served as head writer for A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. In The Big Rewind, Rabin shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story. From a psilocybin-addled trip to the Anne Frank House to having focus groups for his movie-review panel show opine that all the male critics seemed "gay" and that the show as a whole was "too gay," Rabin discusses his personal evolution in prose as hilarious as it is unexpectedly poignant.
Using a specific song, album, book, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his heartwarming tale of triumph over adversity® with biting wit and unwise candor. The pop culture touchstones Rabin uses here reflect his broad frame of reference with comic dissertations on The Simpsons, The Catcher in the Rye, Dr. Dre, Grey Gardens, The Great Gatsby, the Magnetic Fields, the uncanny parallels between Ol' Dirty Bastard and John F. Kennedy, and how the stock market mirrors the pimp game.
Rabin writes movingly about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment -- throughout a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. The Big Rewind is also a touching narrative of a motherless child's search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin's lovable, hard-luck dad.
Featuring cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and Barack Obama, The Big Rewind chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin's life and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I enjoy The AV Club and Nathan Rabin especially for his particularly amusing "My Year of Flops" columns.
How I Liked It: I really wanted to like this book. It was almost market-tested towards my sensibilities (particularly given many of the pop culture references) and the book declares after the opening quotes (by Gene Kelly's Don Lockwood and pulp crime novelist Jim Thompson, respectively)
THIS MACHINE GENTLY SCOLDS FASCISTS.
Despite my misgivings about books by magazine writers (or bloggers) who are generally tolerable only in article length, Rabin holds his own, weaving pop culture into memoir as easily as promised by the descriptions. While the book is a little rocky from not quite deciding what it is (a David Sedarisesque series of stories? A jet black comedy? A bitter exorcism of Rabin's past?) or trying to be too many things at once, it manages fairly well until the last few chapters where Rabin gets to talking about his ill-fated stint as a film critic on the panel of a low-rated basic cable show. His recollections of celebrities don't forward the plot, his backbiting of his fellow cast-members comes across as petty and the narrator from the earlier chapters of the book seems to disappear altogether. Call it time, maybe: the wounds (if you want to call them that) of his television career were and are only a few years old, a time most memoirs address as "the present". The last chapter is an awkward type of love letter to Roger Ebert (who blurbs the back of the book; in an interview Rabin recalls sending him a copy, telling him it featured him prominently) and a kind of clumsy attempt to tie the entire book together.
Maybe the problem does lie singly with Rabin's timing: he's completing this memoir as he is coming into his greatest fame yet however, the memoirs of a troubled upbringing could stand alone. Essentially, he has several angles he's trying to work, including an urge to destigmatize mental illness (Rabin suffers from Depression and is hospitalized as a teen), and it's almost impossible for them to all work together.
Rabin's book may suffer occasionally from an identity crisis similiar to his own and may teeter off at the end, but it's still an interesting read and a must for any AV Club fan.
Notable: The back cover is blurbed by Rich Dahm, co-executive producer of The Colbert Report. In Rabin's recounting the pop culture accomplishments of the Jewish people as he considers his heritage "cultural as well as religious", he notes
"It's Jon Stewart making sense of an insane world on a daily basis." (pg 8)
Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart (among friends, family, and other entertainers, including The Critic television show and "the People Under the Stairs song 'July 3rd'") are thanked in the Acknowledgments section.
Upon entering the group home as an adolescent, Rabin notes that one occupant's parents "seemingly emerged whole cloth from an early John Waters movie." (pg 66)
In the last chapter of the book, Rabin discusses his history untangling before him in a number of film mediums, including Odorama.
My god, are my favorite reference points that transparent?