num_pages: 342
description: From the head writer at The Onion A.V. Club a painfully funny memoir as seen through the sturdy prism of pop culturefor 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 hes 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 childs search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabins 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 Rabins life and its intersection with the dizzying maddening wonderful world of entertainment.
language: English
title: The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture
publisher: Scribner Book Company