The Big Rewind
A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture
By Nathan Rabin
(Scribner, Hardcover, 9781416556206, 368pp.)
Publication Date: July 7, 2009
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook, Paperback
Categories: Personal Memoirs, Popular Culture - General
 |     |
From the head writer at The Onion A.V. Club, a painfully funny memoir as seen through the sturdy prism of pop culture—for fans of Chuck Klosterman and Augusten Burroughs.
As a child and teenager, Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. As an adult, pop culture became his life. For more than a decade he’s served as head writer for The Onion A.V. Club, and here, by way of music, books, films, and television, he shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story.
Using a specific book, song, album, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his Dickensian upbringing with biting wit and brutal, perhaps unwise candor. Throughout a traumatic childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents, Rabin reveals that not only did pop culture shape and mold him, it helped save him from suicidal depression, institu- tionalization, and parental abandonment. Perhaps the most entertaining book ever written about depression and sweet, sweet sexual humiliation, The Big Rewind is also an emotional tale of a motherless child’s search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin’s irascible, lovable, hard-luck dad.
Featuring unexpected cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and some dude named Barack Obama, The Big Rewind chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin’s life, and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment.
Nathan Rabin was born a bicentennial baby in Kansas City, Missouri. During a childhood that could easily be described as “Dickensian,” he spent his formative years in Chicago and came of age in the Jewish Children’s Bureau group home system. While still a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin, Rabin began writing regularly for a plucky local satirical publication called The Onion. Rabin quickly rose up the ranks of The Onion’s entertainment section, The A.V. Club, to become its first, and to date, only, Head Writer. In 2004 and 2005 Rabin was a regular critic on AMC’s Movie Club With John Ridley. With the A.V. Club, he co-wrote the interview collection Tenacity Of The Cockroach and is currently in the process of co-writing the A.V. Club’s upcoming book, which will be published by Scribner. In 2007 he began the cultishly revered twice-weekly online column, “My Year Of Flops,” a feature so popular he decided to continue it indefinitely, despite the project’s title. He lives in Chicago with his two cats, Sweetie Pie and Maggie May.
Did I mention that most of this book is extremely funny? Rabin is aware that there are plenty of hard-luck stories out there, and he's just as hard on himself as he is on such targets as a video store boss, several girlfriends from hell and a Movie Club co-commentator married to the guy who wrote Soul Plane.
With his first book, Rabin turns his trademark acerbic wit back on his own life, a tumultuous journey involving group homes, absentee parents, mental hospitals, polyamorist girlfriends, Topher Grace's vomit, and short-lived cable TV shows.
“[The Big Rewind is] written with [Rabin’s] trademark humor, quirkiness and self-deprecation. It’s an homage to pop culture." —USA Today
“Nathan Rabin had the kind of childhood that aspiring memoirists dream of.” —TimeOut New York
“With his uncanny grasp of cultural zeitgeist, Rabin could unseat Chuck Klosterman as the slacker generation’s vital critical voice.” —Heeb Magazine
This book is on these lists:
Jeanlouise's Wish List by jeanlouiseEasy reading by jeanlouise
Books to buy 4 by lccushman
All lists >>
 |
1Q84 Haruki Murakami Knopf |
 |
The Marriage Plot Jeffrey Eugenides Farrar, Straus, and Giroux |
 |
The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes Knopf |
 |
Death Comes to Pemberley PD James Knopf |
