Product Details
Scribner, July 2009
Hardcover, 368 pages
ISBN-10: 1416556206
ISBN-13: 9781416556206
Description
As a child and teenager, Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. Today, pop culture is his life. For more than a decade, he's served as head writer for A.V. Club, the entertainment section of The Onion. In The Big Rewind, Rabin shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story. From a psilocybin-addled trip to the Anne Frank House to having focus groups for his movie-review panel show opine that all the male critics seemed "gay" and that the show as a whole was "too gay," Rabin discusses his personal evolution in prose as hilarious as it is unexpectedly poignant.
Using a specific song, album, book, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his heartwarming tale of triumph over adversity® with biting wit and unwise candor. The pop culture touchstones Rabin uses here reflect his broad frame of reference with comic dissertations on The Simpsons, The Catcher in the Rye, Dr. Dre, Grey Gardens, The Great Gatsby, the Magnetic Fields, the uncanny parallels between Ol' Dirty Bastard and John F. Kennedy, and how the stock market mirrors the pimp game.
Rabin writes movingly about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment -- throughout a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. The Big Rewind is also a touching narrative of a motherless child's search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin's lovable, hard-luck dad.
Featuring cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and Barack Obama, The Big Rewind chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin's life and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment.
How did you come to write this book?
A few years back, I wrote a manuscript about my experiences flying from Chicago to Los Angeles every weekend to tape AMC's "Movie Club With John Ridley", a poorly rated, mildly disreputable basic-cable movie review panel critics and audiences alike heralded as "short-lived" and "cancelled". It didn't get published but I learned a valuable lesson: people don't want to spend their hard-earned cash on books about television shows nobody has heard of. I quickly abandoned planned oral histories of "Hello Larry" and "Cleghorne!" and decided, on my agent's advice, to write a book proposal for a memoir that filtered my hilariously traumatic real-life tale of growing up in first a mental hospital, then a wealthy foster family whose patience and generosity knew only strict, unyielding boundaries and finally in a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents through the sturdy prism of pop culture. It was an opportunity to crassly exploit a lifetime worth of psychological pain for monetary gain. Despite a tradition of good taste and solid judgment, the good folks at Scribner inexplicably bought my book proposal. I wrote "The Big Rewind" while working on the inaugural season of "My Year of Flops", a popular online series on famous cinematic failures I do for the Onion A.V Club, where I have toiled as the Head Writer for something like a decade. I like to think of "The Big Rewind" and "My Year of Flops" as Siamese twins created in the same tainted womb, so I am delighted to be able to announce that Scribner be publishing a "My Year of Flops" book filled with what SCTV would call "Golden Classics" as well as plenty of awesome original, all-new material. In conclusion, buy my book.
"Nathan Rabin's life reads like a fanboy's collision with Dostoyevsky. This hilarious, sad, truthful memoir is compulsively readable -- a page-turning soap opera about a child abandoned by his mother; loved by his wise, thrice-divorced, painfully crippled, often unemployed father; shuttled through foster homes and asylums; and yet with an invincible sense of humor that led him to contribute briefly to the original Onion in Madison, then leave over 'creative differences,' then rejoin the paper as a film critic for its A.V. Club for the last decade, and star on an AMC program named Movie Club with John Ridley with an optimistic dreamer as his producer and fellow critics who ranged from a darkly Marxist intellectual to a skinny blonde who used the word 'Shakespeare' as a condemnation, while surviving a romantic relationship with 'O,' a sadomasochistic intellectual grad student whose hyperactive sex life only occasionally involved him. He chronicles his adventures with a cross between utter shamelessness and painful honesty, and he is very funny."
-- Roger Ebert
"I'm not as interested in anything as much as Nathan Rabin is interested in everything."
-- Chuck Klosterman
"Rabin writes like the secret love child of Woody Allen and Lester Bangs: honest, erudite, neurotically manic, and very funny."
-- Neal Pollack
"The Big Rewind is heartbreaking and hilarious. Based on the incidents in this book, it's amazing Nathan Rabin is still alive, much less one of the sharpest pop culture critics around. I just hope he's learned his lesson about dating loonball polyamorists."
-- Rich Dahm, co-executive producer of The Colbert Report
"Nathan's memoir is your memoir is my memoir. You will experience moments of sour disagreement, followed by, 'Oh wow, me too!' A book that reads like a conversation. Terrific."
-- Patton Oswalt
"Rabin begins each chapter dissecting some piece of pop ephemera and then shows how this work of film, music, or literature relates directly to a messed-up period of his life. Ultimately, underneath all of the quirky structure, mewling apathy, and caustic wit, Rabin tells a sweet tale of finding one's place in life. That he ends up using his love of popular driftwood as a catalyst for his reviewing career (and gets to meet celebrities!) is the frosting on the cake. Give this to fans of The Catcher in the Rye and Reservoir Dogs."
-- Booklist
"[Rabin] has packed [The Big Rewind], like a cannon, full of caustic wit and bruised feelings. The result is a lo-fi, sometimes crude book that is nonetheless more effective (and affecting) than it has any right to be."
-- The New York Times
"An edgy and funny memoir about a childhood that wasn't so amusing."
-- The Boston Globe
WXEL, October 18, 2009
...written an essay about Dr. Alex Comfort, the pioneering sex researcher behind the book “The Joy of Sex.” Nathan Rabin explains the pivotal role popular culture has played throughout his life. Richard Poplak is the author of 'The Sheik's ...
NPR, July 28, 2009
...Nathan Rabin says his new book The Big Rewind is 'secretly a serious book about depression sort of nestled within this very kind of insane, profane dark comedy.' Charlie Simokaitis Nathan ...
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, July 12, 2009
...'Another crazy Wisconsin boy makes good,' is how Boswell Book Co. describes author Nathan Rabin, the head writer of the entertainment section of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Rabin comes to town at 7 p.m. Friday to discuss and sign ...
Capital Times, July 12, 2009
...Head AV Club writer Nathan Rabin will read from his new memoir, 'The Big Rewind,' Wednesday at Borders West. - Photo courtesy Nathan Rabin print:: comment loading ratings... Weekly humor newspaper The Onion ranks alongside ...
