Tales for an Accelerated Culture

"'This is a manifesto,' Gordinier writes, 'for a generation that never had much use for manifestoes.' Though he sometimes slips into an ironic voice, Gordinier is a wound-up, passionate guy who shares some of his book's good-natured, ranty tone. The book has been praised by Nick Hornby and Neal Pollack."
"The new battle, Gordinier makes clear, is with the boomers' kids: The credulous, slavishly obedient Britney worshipers who have, with their larger numbers and burgeoning consumer power, leapfrogged the Xers and begun to reshape the world in their image."
"'That's right,' he says in his book. 'The boomers bred, and their solipsistic progeny have arrived just in time to serve Generation X a second helping of anxiety.'"

Scott Timberg in the Los Angeles Times interviews writer Jeff Gordinier about his new book, X Saves the World.


"Still, Gordinier deserves credit for his prescience: many of the issues his book addresses are now being dramatized on the political stage. And he can be forgiven if his final paragraphs don’t have the rhetorical flourish of a man the author calls “the most prominent Xer who’d found a way to reconcile his ironic wariness with an impulse to save the world” and the antidote to boomer political kitsch.
"That man would be Barack Obama."

And Kara Jesella reviews the book in The New York Times.