I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) - Softcover

Klosterman, Chuck

Softcover

ISBN 10: 143918450X ISBN 13: 9781439184509

Publisher: Scribner, 2014

Synopsis

One-of-a-kind cultural critic and New York Times bestselling author Chuck Klosterman "offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero" (New York magazine).

Chuck Klosterman, "The Ethicist" for The New York Times Magazine, has walked into the darkness. In I Wear the Black Hat, he questions the modern understanding of villainy. When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying, and why are we so obsessed with saying it? How does the culture of malevolence operate? What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Bernhard Goetz the same way we see Batman? Who is more worthy of our vitriol--Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still haunted by some kid he knew for one week in 1985?

Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). As the Los Angeles Times notes: "By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture--and maybe even American morality." I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that's instantly accessible and really, really funny.

About this title

Review

"Highly entertaining."--Parade

"Intellectually vigorous and entertaining."--Publishers Weekly

"That most of his subjects are from the pop-culture realm, whether Andrew Dice Clay or Chevy Chase or the Eagles, does not diminish the underlying sophistication of Klosterman's guiding questions.... A fine return to form for Klosterman, blending Big Ideas with heavy metal, The Wire, Batman and much more."--Kirkus

"Very much a product of his generation and as plugged into the popular culture as Mencken was antagonistic to it, Klosterman is in that same direct line of cultural critics as Bierce, Mencken, and more recently, P. J. O'Rourke, and his posture is similarly arch and iconoclastic...[I Wear the Black Hat] will amuse and/or outrage but, either way, it should enlarge his audience."--Booklist

"Astute and funny."--USA Today

"Highly entertaining...a beach classic."--New York Times

"Klosterman offers up great facts, interesting cultural insights, and thought-provoking moral calculations in this look at our love affair with the anti-hero."--New York Magazine

"Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and imaginative hypotheticals, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the antihero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). I Wear the Black Hat is a rare example of serious criticism that's instantly accessible and really, really funny."--DC Spotlight

"Klosterman has a knack for holding up a magical high-def mirror to American pop culture that makes all of our vanities and delusions look painfully obvious. Spend enough time reading I Wear the Black Hat, and you might even start to recognize, in its pages, your own silly assumptions, your snap judgments, your stubborn loyalties and your badly rationalized prejudices....By underscoring the contradictory, often knee-jerk ways we encounter the heroes and villains of our culture, Klosterman illustrates the passionate but incomplete computations that have come to define American culture -- and maybe even American morality."--Los Angeles Times

"Klosterman's prose exhibits the same firecrack fizz and pop, and his endearing/unnerving polemical habits remain in place."--Time Out New York

About the Author

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, Fargo Rock City and Chuck Klosterman X) and two novels (Downtown Owl and The Visible Man). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 143918450X
• ISBN 13: 9781439184509
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256