Agent Palmer

In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman looks back at the last decade that actually felt like a decade. It’s hard to view this book as anything other than a transformation, but it’s also hard to ignore that reading this book puts you back there.

This book is a time capsule with the perverse insights that make you wonder about your own memory, the collective memory, and all with a sincerity, exuberance, and authenticity that feels proper.

“Hostility towards nerds and geeks wastes a lot of human capital and impoverishes everyone in the process.” Speaking as someone who has taken his share of this hostility, it’s never easy to bear the brunt of it, but at least thanks in part to David Anderegg, Ph.D. and his book Nerds, I understand where it came from.

Even if it comes from a dark place and is always unwarranted.

“In a political climate where anti-Semitism is resurgent and revisionism goes unchallenged, this history is a counterpoint to the fake news and false assumptions. From the humble hamburger to the space rocket, everything has a Jewish reason.”

The last paragraph on the inside dust jacket for Genius & Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht is not only the reason for its being, it is also a reason to open its pages.

Apparently, I did not know Dr. Seuss. I thought I did. I thought I knew that he wrote a lot of books and that his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel (Ted Geisel works when playing trivia night) and that he wasn’t just a writer but an illustrator as well.

That’s barely the tip of the iceberg.

If that’s also all you know, or even if you know more than that, it’s worth picking up Becoming Dr. Seuss by the biographer Brian Jay Jones, to get the whole story.

Today, the average content creator is likely to get “canceled” by either the right or the left because what they said was ideologically different.

But decades ago, the Smothers Brothers were removed from the airwaves because they were ideologically ahead of their time, and perhaps because they were trying to ruffle a few feathers along the way.

The point is, Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” by David Bianculli is more than a walk through a different time.