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A review by chrisryan
I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains by Chuck Klosterman
2.0
My initial review for this book was going to be: "Merely clever." But then as I got further I started to think it wasn't even very clever; and it isn't funny. It's too bad, because I enjoyed a couple of Klosterman's earlier books.
Here are a couple of quick examples:
"Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really 'need' anything new, so we only create what we want." If he's trying to be funny with this sort of end-of-history thinking, he isn't succeeding. But I don't think he's trying to be funny here. Do I need to give examples? I'm not going to bother.
Or this sentence: "He refused to pretend that his life didn't feel normal to the person inside it." WHAT?! The book is full of this kind of thing. It would be head-scratching if it was worth scratching one's head about. But it isn't.
Here are a couple of quick examples:
"Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don't really 'need' anything new, so we only create what we want." If he's trying to be funny with this sort of end-of-history thinking, he isn't succeeding. But I don't think he's trying to be funny here. Do I need to give examples? I'm not going to bother.
Or this sentence: "He refused to pretend that his life didn't feel normal to the person inside it." WHAT?! The book is full of this kind of thing. It would be head-scratching if it was worth scratching one's head about. But it isn't.