A shrewd and hilarious call
to arms for the generation that
fell between the cracks
Jammed in between the garish showboating of the baby boomers and the tabloid-trash stunts of the milennials, the discerning generation that gave us Yahoo! and Yo La Tengo has been underrepresented for too long in pop sociology, but reporter and essayist Jeff Gordinier argues that it’s time for the slackers to rise up and take charge. Taking off from his controversial Details essay “Has Generation X Already Peaked?” Gordinier takes the reader along on an enthralling, eye-opening journey—from the expatriate garrets of Prague to the amped-up offices of dot-com San Francisco, from the muddy fields of Woodstock ’94 to the celebrity-obsessed media machine of Us Weekly—in his quest to find the essence of X. Along the way he shows how Gen X innovations in art, comedy, technology, activism, and (gasp!) business have come to define the way we live now. A proud, accomplished, and unrepentant X-er, Jeff Gordinier writes with insight and biting wit about the generation that time forgot—and makes a convincing case for Gen X as maybe, secretly, the “greatest generation” of all. Like Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and The Tipping Point, X Saves the World flips conventional wisdom on its head and expertly captures the spirit of a strange and crucial era in American society.
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IN PRAISE OF X
“I loved this book…it’s impassioned, very quick on its feet, dense
with all the right allusions, funny, and in the end, actually very
moving.”
–Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity and Fever Pitch, in The Believer
“This is the passionate defense that our much-maligned generation deserves.”
–Neal Pollack, author of Alternadad
“I think Jeff Gordinier might be the secret love child of Tom Wolfe
and Douglas Coupland. This book is a fascinating, thought-provoking
and funny look at America today. It’s about more than Gen X, it’s
about everyone.”
–A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically
“X Saves the World is a great read—fast, funny and incisive. It’s a
thrill watching Jeff Gordinier spin his extensive cultural Rolodex and
if I weren’t so ironic and detached myself, I’d suggest anointing him
the new voice of our generation-in-exile.”
–Jess Walter, author of The Zero
“When future archeologists recover the artifacts from our failed
civilization, may they at least find some reference to the forgotten
sliver of a generation chronicled here, who dared to consider - even
just consider - whether doing something other than selling out was a
viable option.”
– Douglas Rushkoff, author of Coercion and Media Virus!
“As a boomer through and through, I was skeptical: a bunch of 35- to
45-year olds formally famous for their most excellent slacking could
now save art, music, and activism from the corporate monoculture? But
in this passionate, beautifully written ode to the generation that
even stereotypes forgot, Jeff Gordinier has made me believe.”
–Leslie Savan, author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers
“Perception: Generation X’s legacy amounts to Doc Martens and Pearl
Jam CDs. Reality: Think instead Barack Obama, Jon Stewart, Google, and
so much more. Jeff Gordinier’s lucid, passionate prose makes the case
for the Greatest Lost Generation—what it’s actually contributed and
how it’s shaping our world in more ways than you’d think.”
–David Browne, author of Goodbye 20th Century: A Biography of Sonic Youth
“As a Marine, I hate slackers. As an X-er, I hate manifestos. As an
MBA, I hate jokes. This is a slacker manifesto filled with jokes. But
it doesn’t suck. In fact, it’s pretty great.”
–Nathaniel Fick, author of One Bullet Away
“This book is a wake-up call for all the horizon-peekers who are
perpetually writing off the old guard to canonize the new, a trenchant
and clever analysis of how Gen X’s constructive cynicism has shaped
the world as we know it. In prose that crackles with savage wit, Jeff
Gordinier is here to tell us Gen X’ers that the future is now.”
–Marc Weingarten, author of The Gang that Wouldn’t Write Straight
“Jeff Gordinier’s X Saves The World is full of fresh, sometimes
painfully lucid observations of the cultural shape-shifters called
Generation X. While the cliché of X-ers has always been that they
were plagued by “irony” and “cynicism,” Gordinier sees the attitude of
mistrust implied by those words as something that could rescue us. His
argument is that there is a politics implicit in mistrust; that
continually questioning the culture is a very real and viable form of
protest.”
–Emily White, author of Fast Girls
X Saves the World in The Nation!
X Saves the World in Fast Company!