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    Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
    Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
    Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

    Written by Chuck Klosterman

    Narrated by Chuck Klosterman

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    About this audiobook

    Coming off the breakthrough success of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and Killing Yourself to Live, bestselling pop culture guru Chuck Klosterman assembles his best work previously unavailable in book form—including the groundbreaking 1996 piece about his chicken McNuggets experiment, his uncensored profile of Britney Spears, and a previously unpublished short story—all recontextualized in Chuck’s unique voice with new intros, outros, segues, and masterful footnotes.

    Chuck Klosterman IV consists of three parts:

    Things That Are True—Profiles and trend stories: Britney Spears, Radiohead, Billy Joel, Metallica, Val Kilmer, Bono, Wilco, the White Stripes, Steve Nash, Morrissey, Robert Plant—all with new introductions and footnotes.

    Things That Might Be True—Opinions and theories on everything from monogamy to pirates to robots to super people to guilt, and (of course) Advancement—all with new hypothetical questions and footnotes.

    Something That Isn’t True At All—This is old fiction. There’s a new introduction, but no footnotes. Well, there’s a footnote in the introduction, but none in the story.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 5, 2006
    ISBN9780743563826
    Author

    Chuck Klosterman

    Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl, The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons. 

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    Reviews for Chuck Klosterman IV

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    • 4/5
      I like Chuck Klosterman. I think it's hip not to like him now, but I don't really give a shit. His Wilco profile was fun, as was his Radiohead piece. I wasn't crazy about some of his "theories," but his terrific profile of the Rock Cruise (a Carnival cruise featuring performances by Journey, Styx, and REO Speedwagon) had me giggling like crazy.As I read this book, I started to think about how the entire magazine industry exists solely to prop up the entertainment industry, featuring profiles of whoever has a new movie or album out. Without one, the other would likely crumble. I suppose that if I must read another piece probing the inner-workings of some hack rock band, I'd prefer it be Mr. Klosterman doing the probing.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      a cool book. sort of a collection of different articles Klosterman had appeared in and written since he got famous (circa 2004-2005) a very special interview is his Val Kilmer one where Kilmer admits to knowing more what it's like to be Jim Morrison than Jim Morrison did after playing him in a film. that's how intense his method acting is. Klosterman is great at bringing out strange words from people. and his style is beautiful in a modern sort of way. look out for this if you're a music journalist fan.
    • 3/5
      Hmmm....well....hmmm. Have you ever read the celebrity profiles in magazines like Esquire, Vanity Fair, Spin, etc? Well, if so - and you like them - you've got the spirit of Chuck K. IV is a collection of his essays, which he introduces with a short lead-in. The lead-ins provide context on his thinking or approach at the time and they were generally interesting.The book is a play in three acts:Act 1, "things that are true," are reprints or, in some cases, unedited originals of some of his celebrity profiles and interviews. These range from a young Britney Spears to Steve Nash to Val Kilmer to Jeff Tweedy and Thom Yorke. My personal favorites are the ones about Styx and the 70s music cruise and his investigative reporting on his local clairvoyant scene. His interviews are humanizing rather than salacious and he mostly lets you draw your own conclusions.Act 2, "things that might be true," is a collection of cultural perspective pieces. These I liked more. He's an interesting brain and while I don't always agree with his point of view, that's what makes him interesting. Also, his writing is funny, self-deprecating and incisive. I found myself laughing out loud at several of his essays and unfortunately it's turns of phrase that don't work outside the context of his writing. Some of his phrasing, I'd love to steal, but it'd just be peculiar. Particular favorites: Nemesis, Stories about Pants.Act 3, "something that isn't true," is a short story that's...marginal. CK's perspective on the story is more interesting than the story itself. It just reads, unfinished and inserted because he didn't really know how to stick the landing and wanted to round out the content beyond stuff previously published in periodicals. This is a book that's easy to dip in and out if you're in a line or a doctor's office and need a book that's easy to put down when your number is called. One week later I'm left with a mildly positive perception, but can remember few specifics. It's like a dessert--it tastes good at the time, but it's not particularly memorable and not nutritious.Recommended if you're interested in pop culture and appreciate different perspectives on it. And bonus if your pop culture flavor is circa 80s or even 90s as that's about the right time period to appreciate it.
    • 4/5
      Klosterman's the type of guy you feel smart-yet-slightly-cool for reading. He observes the world through a unique lens which is evident whether he's interviewing a Steve Nash or discussing the ethics of chasing after women in committed relationships.This book largely a collection of previously published articles about pop-culture icons. It's more than mere anthology, though?Klosterman wrote introductions and footnotes to the articles that are often as illuminating as the article itself. As if this wasn't enough, he ended this volume with a short quasi-autobiographical novella to round out the collection. Oddly enough, it all seems to flow together.His perspective can grow wearisome, but (like Douglas Coupland) after placing the book down for a brief sabbatical you'll find yourself craving more.Klosterman's a commentator on the human condition. A condition he perceives more accurately than most.
    • 4/5
      This is a series of articles published by Chuck Klosterman who writes for Rolling Stone, among other things. He groups the articles by type: interviews with musicians, politics observations, etc. He's a great writer with interesting views. He writes little memories and whatnots to introduce the articles
    • 3/5
      I thought this started out great--I really liked his celebrity profiles--but got progressively lamer through his opinion pieces and pretty much sucked by the time he got to the short story at the end.
      My favorite parts were his introductions to each article, and the little thought-experiments like "would you rather be remembered as a good, kind, hard-working person, but most people will forget you ever existed, or would you like to be widely known and remembered for a long time for something trivial and silly like General Tso of General Tso's chicken?""
    • 2/5
      This book vaguely sickens me. Reminds me of a subpar blog, pretending to be wise and dispensing nuggets of cultural wisdom, where instead it offers the most banal of insights.
    • 3/5
      My most trenchant criticism of Klosterman is that his works are TOO relevant. His allusions draw so heavily from Gen X culture that he suffers the risk of receiving no long-term payout from his producing such contemporary books.The first chapter did not pique my interest. It seemed to be the quintessential mediocrity the Internet (and angst-ridden post-90s/iPod culture) has spawned.The Britney Spears interview was fun and light and hilarious. Klosterman, however, benefits from the fact that his interviewees are so removed from our reach. Their public impenetrability allows him to write exaggeratedly, clumsily, and weirdly about all manners of celebrity.He took a conservative, if not conventional approach to The Smiths and Morrissey, which annoyed me. If the Hispanics of LA abandoned Morrissey, he would not be fanless! Smiths enthusiasts appreciate and venerate Johnny Marr--perhaps not to the extent they do Morrissey--AS WELL as Morrissey.
    • 4/5
      Once I started reading this I realized I had read some of the articles previously, the first time they were published in magazines. That doesn't mean I didn't enjoy them just as much the second time around. Klosterman is a writer of quick wit, more than a few pop culture references, and a charming tone of slight self-deprecation. More than a few times I laughed out loud while reading this book, and even when the topics concerned things I have zero interest in (such as, sports), the writing was engaging enough to keep me reading, as well as laughing.
    • 4/5
      Contains previously published interviews and essays on personalities and topics as disparate as Britney Spears, Radiohead and the phenomenon of Latino Morrissey fans. Generally speaking, this is a pretty fun read. Klosterman's Advancement Theory is one of the most brilliant hypotheses I've ever encountered and it almost makes sense....kind of. At times, though, his analysis of social issues makes him sound a bit condescending and he has a tendency to over simplify issues (such as his take on international political dynamics). Fortunately, there's more than enough mirth and playful self-deprecation to make up for these slight lapses.
    • 4/5
      ?Super funny, but then again his books always are.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book. Extremely easy read and humorous.
    • 3/5
      This book is split into three sections: interviews and features, opinion pieces, and a work of fiction. The first two sections contain material already published in various places, like Esquire. If you like reading magazines, you'll probably like reading these sections. I found them to be short, a little too short.The interviews all seemed to be getting at the same thing: famous people are people, and they're aware that they're being interviewed, just like you and I would be. At best, the interviews made me want to watch Real Genius or listen to some music I hadn't heard in a while. At times they were boring, superficial, and, well, trendy. I guess that's just the nature of magazine writing.I found the opinion pieces to be much more interesting and amusing: robots, pirates, archenemies and nemeses, what could go wrong?I didn't read the fiction, it just didn't seem necessary. I may have missed something good though, who knows?
    • 3/5
      While fun and different from most journalistic essays, especially ones involving pop culture, the pieces struggle for nique perspectives on tired topics which ultimately aren't as wry and subversive as he would hope.
    • 3/5
      In brief: Section One (the interviews) was interesting enough. Section Two (the essays) was genuinely enjoyable (in particular, how to discern a nemesis from an archenemy) Section Three (the short story) started atrociously, and ended blankly (meaning, I felt nothing. No joy, no annoyance, etc. Nothing). At one point in the story the main character is talking about someone who isn't funny, but "writes in the style of funniness" (paraphrasing, badly). That seemed to be an apt summary of Section Three as a whole. It was there I was most aware of the "trying too hard". Overall, I liked it.
    • 4/5
      I fell in love with Chuck Klosterman's writing and this was the third book by him that I read in a row. This is a collection of his essays that have featured in magazines, and includes pieces on Britney Spears, Radiohead, Billy Joel and Val Kilmer. It has everything you would expect from his writing, namely lots references to rock music and popular culture, but some of it did seem to overlap with territory covered in "Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs". It also includes his first venture into fiction, a short story that is interesting but left me wanting more.Overall, not my favourite work by Klosterman that is still preferable to the vast majority of other writers.
    • 4/5
      not bad. better than the last one i read. kind of falters towards the end though.
    • 3/5
      Reading Klosterman is becoming a guilty pleasure.