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Whistle Stopper - Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto
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List Price: $14.00
Our Price: $6.00
Your Save: $ 8.00 ( 57% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Scribner
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.0973
EAN: 9780743236010
ISBN: 0743236017
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2004-06-22
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: uhhh
Comment: well this book was pretty good, but a lot of the time i had some trouble relating to it because i'm a gen y-er not x, so i didn't grow up with those cultural refrences i guess. it was pretty readable though. i'm sure if i could better relate to the material i would have given it a higher rating, but as it is... its ok.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Always enjoyable
Comment: This is the second book of Klosterman's I've read. The first, and my introduction to Klosterman, was "IV." I like both these books equally and for similar reasons. In here, Klosterman observes seemingly mindless and inconsiquential tidbits and expands upon them in a way that inflates their importance to unprecedented levels; i.e. how "Saved by the Bell" is familiar to anyone in the X or Y generation, but totally alien to anyone outside those specific demographics.
Chuck might have you question the real importance of his subjects, but he is always a fun read (except maybe "Fargo...") and he is, more often than not, and more often than most, insightful and thought provoking.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Bland and Soggy....Cocoa Puffs.
Comment: I thought this book was a little bit comedic in some areas while completely over analytical in others. I don't want to read six pages of analyzing Saved by the Bell. It's a kid show, it's not meant to be taken seriously. Sometimes, things should just be looked at in the big picture, enjoyed for what it was.
Some parts were funny, interesting, but I found myself sort of drifting away... It became too rhetoric, too much like a lecture in which someone is telling you what's "uberly" important and what sucks. It became really bland, really fast.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Pop-Culture is toxic and gives you cancer
Comment: A very enjoyable series of essays about pop-culture from a smart, clever, angry, and extremely talented writer who is a self-confessed junkie of all things Gen-X, Gen-Y, hipster, geekdom, nerdsville and otherwise.
"Billy Sim" dissects the computer gaming phenom of The Sims; "Appetite for Repetition" takes an up-close-and-personal view of a Guns-n-Roses tribute band; "Being Zack Morris" explores the odd cultural obsession with "Saved By The Bell"; and 15 variously-themed essays delve into not only the psyche of Klosterman but, by extension, the psyche of America.
In the trade paperback version, there are extra nuggets of Chuck-mania -- after each chapter, a quick shot of dialogue, banter, or, in the case of "23 Questions I Ask To Decide if I Can Really Love Them" (following Chapter 10) a hilarious, freaked-out rorshach test for the morally ambiguous. Not all the essays hit the mark, but the majority do, so a definite recommend. Cintra Wilson's book "A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-examined As A Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations" is funnier and wittier by far, but Klosterman works in a slightly separate universe that is equally satisfying.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Amusing and Perceptive At Times, Incoherent and Annoying at Others
Comment: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a collection of essays on popular culture and its connections to psychology, sociology, and other inner workings of society. This book is mainly geared toward Generation X'ers, and I believe that older people may appreciate it, but significantly younger people (born after, say, 1990) may not, since the references may be too obscure.
The book covers a variety of topics, from serial killers to the Lakers/Celtics rivalry to breakfast cereal to Billy Joel to "The Real World," and makes an attempt at finding deeper meaning in all of these things. The collection starts out strong with a rant on why John Cusack has ruined the love lives of everyone (men and women) born between 1965 and 1978. This is funny and promising to anyone who feels similarly.
The biggest downside of this collection is that Klosterman's writing and his skill at making a coherent point are highly variable. Some essays were very strong and cohesive ("What Happens When People Stop Being Polite," on The Real World series; "All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers," on the media and why it works; "This is Zodiac Speaking," on serial killers; "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found, on born-again Christianity), and I definitely laughed out loud several times. Other essays ("Every Dog Must Have His Every Day..." on the genius of Billy Joel; "Ten Seconds to Love," comparing Pam Anderson to Marilyn Monroe; "33" on the Lakers/Celtics rivalry) were incoherent and rambling. Klosterman insists that everything is connected and really does set out to connect, well, everything. He sometimes succeeds and sometimes I was left thinking that this is a man who likes the sound of his own voice (or pen, as it were) and tries to make a lot of pseudo-intellectual (or maybe even true intellectual references) to make the reader believe that what he's saying actually makes sense. The collection improves significantly at the last three or four essays, and I felt that Klosterman dropped any pretension or self-satisfaction and just wrote, which worked a lot better.
I definitely feel that someone born in 1980 or earlier would enjoy this collection as a whole, but I would definitely recommend skimming or skipping the ones on topics in which the reader is less than interested.
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Editorial Reviews:
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There's quite a bit of intelligent analysis and thought-provoking insight packed into the pages of Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which is a little surprising considering how darn stupid most of Klosterman's subject matter actually is. Klosterman, one of the few members of the so-called "Generation X" to proudly embrace that label and the stereotypical image of disaffected slackers that often accompanies it, takes the reader on a witty and highly entertaining tour through portions of pop culture not usually subjected to analysis and presents his thoughts on Saved by the Bell, Billy Joel, amateur porn, MTV's The Real World, and much more. It would be easy in dealing with such subject matter to simply pile on some undergraduate level deconstruction, make a few jokes, and have yourself a clever little book. But Klosterman goes deeper than that, often employing his own life spent as a member of the lowbrow target demographic to measure the cultural impact of his subjects. While the book never quite lives up to the use of the word "manifesto" in the title (it's really more of a survey mixed with elements of memoir), there is much here to entertain and illuminate, particularly passages on the psychoses and motivations of breakfast cereal mascots, the difference between Celtic fans and Laker fans, and The Empire Strikes Back. Sections on a Guns n' Roses tribute band, The Sims, and soccer feel more like magazine pieces included to fill space than part of a cohesive whole. But when you're talking about a book based on a section of cultural history so reliant on a lack of attention span, even the incongruities feel somehow appropriate. --John Moe
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