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: eBook
Categories: Personal Memoirs, Popular Culture - General
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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.
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.
"Nathan Rabin's life reads like a fanboy's collision with Dostoyevsky. This hilarious, sad, truthful memoir is compulsively readable -- a page-turning soap opera about a child abandoned by his mother; loved by his wise, thrice-divorced, painfully crippled, often unemployed father; shuttled through foster homes and asylums; and yet with an invincible sense of humor that led him to contribute briefly to the original Onion in Madison, then leave over 'creative differences,' then rejoin the paper as a film critic for its A.V. Club for the last decade, and star on an AMC program named Movie Club with John Ridley with an optimistic dreamer as his producer and fellow critics who ranged from a darkly Marxist intellectual to a skinny blonde who used the word 'Shakespeare' as a condemnation, while surviving a romantic relationship with 'O,' a sadomasochistic intellectual grad student whose hyperactive sex life only occasionally involved him. He chronicles his adventures with a cross between utter shamelessness and painful honesty, and he is very funny."-- Roger Ebert
"I'm not as interested in anything as much as Nathan Rabin is interested in everything."-- Chuck Klosterman
"Rabin writes like the secret love child of Woody Allen and Lester Bangs: honest, erudite, neurotically manic, and very funny."-- Neal Pollack
"The Big Rewind is heartbreaking and hilarious. Based on the incidents in this book, it's amazing Nathan Rabin is still alive, much less one of the sharpest pop culture critics around. I just hope he's learned his lesson about dating loonball polyamorists."-- Rich Dahm, co-executive producer of The Colbert Report
"Nathan's memoir is your memoir is my memoir. You will experience moments of sour disagreement, followed by, 'Oh wow, me too!' A book that reads like a conversation. Terrific."-- Patton Oswalt
"Rabin begins each chapter dissecting some piece of pop ephemera and then shows how this work of film, music, or literature relates directly to a messed-up period of his life. Ultimately, underneath all of the quirky structure, mewling apathy, and caustic wit, Rabin tells a sweet tale of finding one's place in life. That he ends up using his love of popular driftwood as a catalyst for his reviewing career (and gets to meet celebrities!) is the frosting on the cake. Give this to fans of The Catcher in the Rye and Reservoir Dogs." -- Booklist
"[Rabin] has packed [The Big Rewind], like a cannon, full of caustic wit and bruised feelings. The result is a lo-fi, sometimes crude book that is nonetheless more effective (and affecting) than it has any right to be."-- The New York Times
"An edgy and funny memoir about a childhood that wasn't so amusing."-- The Boston Globe
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