i liked parts of this book. i liked the idea of this book. eventhough it takes the romance out of going to a grateful dead show it made me wish i had gone to one. but i would have been just like some of the characters in the stories-kind of clueless about the whole dead picture and aiming to get high.

I love Coupland, I love the Dead...what can I say? Actually, I think part of this book started out as a piece in Rolling Stone. The whole collection of stories works. Something for everyone.

Odd book, can't really figure out what the point was but the photos were more interesting than the stories.

Beetje vreemd, maar de mix woord-foto is geslaagd!

A very strange work of...well, let's called it Coupland-on-auto-pilot-randomness. The first third is a fictional series of vignettes taking place at a Grateful Dead concert...and nails (in many ways) the lid on the coffin of the 1960s and 1970s by the "hard" realities of the 1990s. The second third of the book is a series of melancholy essays about cultural post-moderism...or should that be post-90s-isms. It's all well and good, but then the final third of the book lurches into the territory of OJ Simpson/vacuous California non-culture obsession. The end result is a work that staggers between (1) being rather profound, AND (2) feeling profoundly dated.

To echo another reviewer, this is a much better book now than it was when it first came out. The content, of course, is the same, but I am a much different reader when this was published 15 years ago. At twenty I had to practice an ironic detachment from what Coupland was saying about the 1990s and who we were then; I thought he had no right to define "us". Now, I can see that his insight into the culture back then was crystal clear. He had it right all along.

Coupland is a gifted essayist, and you might want to give this a try even if you don't enjoy his novels. Far from being a random selection of topics, the short pieces in the book all have a lot to say about human nature, a topic on which Coupland is one of the best writers around, period.

Didn't love it as much as his fiction voice. There was a great essay about a bridge, but I didn't connect as readily to the narrative voice here as I do with that of his fiction.

Especially like the author's observations in "Postcard Number Two: Power Failure"

You or I could have written these stories. But we didn't.

A mixed collection of essays and observations.

This book takes snippets of 1990s California culture centered on celebrity, death, and crime, and applies these as a backdrop for a turning point in American culture as a whole. The narrative stories that make up our lives are sometimes lost in the pursuit of newness or fame - where does this leave us as individuals, and as a community?

Collection of essayish cultural observations by Coupland