THE NINETIES: A BOOK.

• Author: Brown, Elizabeth Nolan
• Position: BOOK

Today, "if you ask a semi-educated young person to identify the root cause of most American problems, there's a strong possibility they will say, 'Capitalism.'" In the '90s, the more probable answer "would have been commercialism." So observes the wide-ranging culture critic Chuck Klosterman in The Nineties: A Book.

Without pronouncing judgment on the shift, the book riffs on it for a few pages before morphing into an analysis of the song "Achy Breaky Heart," then segueing to Garth Brooks, Seinfeld, and Titanic.

That's the overall experience of reading The Nineties--a collection of breezy and dryly humorous dispatches from our current moment about iconic events, artifacts, postures, and controversies from three decades ago. There's Nirvana and the first Iraq war; Google and steroids in baseball; American Beauty. Ebonics, and Waco; VCRs, Crystal Pepsi, and Ross Perot.

There is no overarching theme, and perhaps there couldn't be. Anyone imposing a neat message on 10 years of disparate events and trends is probably trying...