The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture [Hardcover]

Nathan Rabin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 7, 2009

From the head writer at The Onion A.V. Club, a painfully funny memoir as seen through the sturdy prism of pop culture—for fans of Chuck Klosterman and Augusten Burroughs. 

As  a  child  and  teenager,  Nathan  Rabin  viewed  pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. As an adult, pop culture became his life. For more than a decade he’s served as head writer for The Onion A.V. Club, and here, by way of music, books, films, and television, he shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story.

Using a specific book, song, album, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his Dickensian upbringing with biting wit and brutal, perhaps unwise candor. Throughout a traumatic childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents, Rabin reveals that not only did pop culture shape and mold him, it helped save him from suicidal depression, institu- tionalization, and parental abandonment. Perhaps the most entertaining book ever written about depression and sweet, sweet sexual humiliation, The Big Rewind is also an emotional tale of a motherless child’s search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin’s irascible, lovable, hard-luck dad.

Featuring unexpected cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and some dude named Barack Obama, The Big Rewind chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin’s life, and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rabin, a writer for the Onion's arts section, endured a dysfunctional childhood marked by parental abandonment, a stint in a mental hospital and an adolescence spent in a group home and a drug-ridden co-op house. And in this memoir, he views his life through the blurry lens of formative cultural influences. His episodic narrative recounts a sarcastic, insecure youth's gonzo misadventures with a cast of freaks, misfits and aloof or cruelly promiscuous girlfriends, then moves on to adult run-ins with air-sick celebrities, bored prostitutes and nutty Hollywood types. Convinced that cultural tastes reveal the soul, like a My Space page, Rabin opens each chapter with an earnest (though rarely incisive) appreciation of some favorite in a personal canon that ranges from rap albums to The Great Gatsby, and intrusively peppers his writing with pop culture references. There are, alas, limits to the evocative power of pop culture references, and the author's arcane allusions—Susanne and Jack's relationship was like a gender-switched version of the star-crossed duo in the Stephen Malkmus song 'Jenny and the Ess-Dog' —test them. Rabin's vigorous, smart-assed prose sometimes brings the sideshow vividly to life, but it's marred by self-conscious fanboyism and labored jokiness. (July)
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Review

“[The Big Rewind is] written with [Rabin’s] trademark humor, quirkiness and self-deprecation. It’s an homage to pop culture." —USA Today

“Nathan Rabin had the kind of childhood that aspiring memoirists dream of.” —TimeOut New York

“With his uncanny grasp of cultural zeitgeist, Rabin could unseat Chuck Klosterman as the slacker generation’s vital critical voice.” —Heeb Magazine

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (July 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416556206
• ISBN-13: 978-1416556206
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #879,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am a very old young man with a brutally funny, unwisely candid memoir to pimp and a message to spread throughout the world. That message: buy my book. Seriously. It's an awesome book and if it doesn't sell I'll have to go back to being a hobo.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Confessions Of A Culture Vulture, June 27, 2009

By 

Bill Slocum (Norwalk, CT USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture (Hardcover)

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[A Vine Review - Thanks, Amazon!]

Nathan Rabin may be a first-time author, but I know him well from reading his A.V. Club articles and the enormous discussion threads they spawn. His discursive, caustic, and quite funny writing style has a gift for transforming a long and pointless afternoon into something longer and just as pointless, only far more entertaining.

As a critic of today, Rabin's the kind of guy who can break anything down into popular entertainment references, so it almost makes sense that when he decided to tell the story of his life, he organized it into chapters referencing famous books, records, and films.

His stay as a boy in a mental institution? He's reminded of the book "Girl, Interrupted" - and careful to point out, not the later film adaptation.

Various relationships with girls are prompted with chapters spotlighting Rabin's takes on Rod Stewart and Jean-Luc Godard. Living in a hippie co-op in Madison, Wisconsin prompts a reference to "Freaks", the Tod Browning cult film. "My fellow co-opers were the stuff of Lou Reed songs," he explains.

Movies became for Rabin a channel of expression and a shelter from the storm: "Movies afforded the rewards of human interaction with none of the terrifying hazards of actual human contact," he writes. Real life has teeth, and Rabin often felt its bite.

I've seen this done before with songs alone, which do lend themselves to this kind of subjective treatment. Movies don't, and Rabin struggles to find the same connecting strands that come more easily from a song like "Maggie May". When Rabin uses "Apocalypse Now" as a basis for comparing a mildly domineering authority figure in Rabin's life to the terrifyingly unhinged Col. Kurtz from the film, it's a sign he's really pushing for significance.

More problematically, not every episode he writes about is as interesting to us as it is to him. There's three chapters alone on Rabin's brief, unsuccessful attempt at being a movie critic on TV, something he writes about with the minute, gory precision of the Starr Report.

When something does click, though, it often clicks hard, like his meeting the woman who gave birth to him, then left him alone for 20 years. When he meets her again, he finds her utterly unconcerned about the emotional damage she has left, and nutty enough for Rabin to realize he's grateful to have escaped her notice.

"Every Mother's Day I'm struck with an urge to send Biological Mother a card but I've yet to find one with a message like 'To a Mother Who's Disappointed Me in Every Conceivable Way.'"

"The Big Rewind" is hardly a disappointment of that order. It's structurally deficient, yes, but otherwise often engaging enough to read through quickly and wonder, if this was another A.V. Club posting, what the discussion thread would look like.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars El Pollo Loco's Revenge, July 13, 2009

By 

Nick (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture (Hardcover)

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What do El Pollo Loco, mental institutions, Siskel & Ebert, crazy moms in sweat pants, awesome music, long lists using commas instead of semicolons, and being Jewish have in common?

Nathan Rabin's The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture.

I should stop there, but I won't. I don't read a lot of autobiographies since they're usually stuffy "look at what an amazing person I turned out to be, one that you envy and now live vicariously through, since you just spent $30 to read about me" memoirs by people that I don't care about.

I don't care about Nathan Rabin, either -- actually, we're basically best friends now, just like Nathan and Topher Grace -- but this book made me laugh so hard a few times that I had to wipe tears from my cheeks. The guy's had an amazingly sad and entertaining life. He writes about it in a honest and humorously self-depreciating manner that makes it easy to relate to his life and his personal failures and accomplishments, but mostly his failures.

I enjoyed that he ties each chapter of his life (figuratively and literally) in with a song/album and/or a classic book or movie. Being the same age as the author, I found myself suddenly being sucked back to various parts of my youth and remembering exactly what it felt like to be alive when, for example, Nirvana was first blowing up and ending abruptly or watching MTV as NWA helped rap start to veer away from raps about gold chains and women to raps about guns, drugs, and women...and gold chains.

The honesty and bluntness of Nathan Rabin's autobiography impressed me incredibly. There were times when I blushed, because at points I felt like I was reading stories from my own embarrassing encounters with women and other social situations. Some of the things he decided to include about his personal life were both touching and largely a lot more information than I needed to know about a stranger; in a very sincere way it helped to make his story one that's easy to find solace in as a recovering geek/nerd/self-conscious person. I'm not sure if that's the result he wanted or not.

I honestly didn't want to put the book down, but sleep and various tasks involving the use of both my hands made that impossible. Buy it. Seriously.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Heartwarming Tale of triumph over adversity (TM), June 26, 2009

By 

Kristine Hale (Utah) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture (Hardcover)

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I didn't know anything about Nathan Rabin prior to picking up this book, and although I enjoy The Onion, I hadn't read anything that he had written there. But I love pop-culture, and I nabbed this book up based on the words "The Onion" and "Pop-culture" from the book's description. That's how easily swayed I am.

Having finished this book, I can safely say that now I know oodles about Nathan Rabin. Most importantly: that Rabin is a witty, engaging and highly amusing story-teller (and that he rarely agrees with the Oscars). From the first page, this book had me hooked. Weaving a story from Rabin's turbulent youth, through the triumphant bonding with his father over Chipotle coupons and landing firmly in an Ebert and Roeper audition, (all tied up a with pop-culture touchstone bow) I couldn't put it down.

This book is dark, sarcastic and incredibly, intelligently funny. It is safe to say that anyone who enjoys The Onion, grew up with Nirvana or simply likes their humor dark, whether you know Nathan Rabin or not, will love this book.