First time reading Chuck Klosterman. Book is unlike any I've read. He tackles an interesting topic with unusual insights and crisp, entertaining yet analytical writing. Klosterman finds a wide array of villains to analyze -- from The Eagles to Joseph Stalin. If I one criticism of the book I suppose sometimes it's a little too erratic with a couple of chapters. I thought they could have stood alone as magazine essays but didn't really hand together with other parts of the book. Nothing that should keep you from reading this one. I strongly recommend. ( )

For reasons I probably don't have to articulate, I feel like I should not like Klosterman or this book. But I loved it, I love the subject, and I couldn't put it down. I am weak? ( )

Pretty funny book, but the last chapter is the clincher for why this is 5-stars. I won't ruin it for you. ( )

It's not about the kind of villains you're probably thinking of, except for the one token chapter about Hitler, but spends more time on the public figures decried widely in the 1980s and 1990s, a few from this century. Even though I lived through that time, it had the effect on me of thinking "oh yeah, I haven't thought about him in a long time" or misremembering the particulars of what made each particular one so vilified. It isn't so much about the motivations these people had but the reason why the public perception of the villain's worldview makes them so despised, more about mass psychology and less about criminal psychology. The author is also interested in why certain individuals who have performed similar acts as others are not treated as villains in the same way. It isn't really a how-to guide on avoiding being considered a bad person, or even on how to get yourself noticed as a bad person, but more a series of meditations on different aspects of the phenomenon. ( )

Chuck Klosterman has pretty much only one overarching idea here: the concept of the villain in any situation as the one who "knows the most and cares the least." It's an intriguing thought, but not one that seems definitive to me at all. And, honestly, I'm not sure Klosterman really thinks it is, either. It seems to just be a notion he likes to keep coming back to.

Other than that, this examination of villains and bad guys and who they are and what they mean is very freewheeling. Individual chapters may have a particular focus, but, as a whole, it's not a carefully structured exploration of the idea of villainy that's aimed at coming to any strong conclusions on the subject. It's mostly just Klosterman noodling around with the idea of villains, what they mean to him, what they seem to mean to society at large, and how to wrap his head around it all. He goes a lot of different places with it, thinking about villains in history (including very recent history), in fiction, in sports, in music, and in our culture in general. A lot of it is personal, based in Klosterman's own experiences and attitudes. He spends a good part of one chapter on a list of various bands he used to hate when the was younger, for what now mostly seem like really dumb reasons. He spends another whole chapter comparing Bernard Goetz and Batman. In another, he mostly talks about how hard it is to talk about Hitler. And so on and so forth.

And this loose structure, it turns out, works really well. I found it interesting and surprisingly rewarding to just sort of follow Klosterman's mind wherever it happened to go. He has a lot of thought-provoking things to say, and while I don't necessarily agree with him about everything, I think he actually makes some points that are really insightful and important. He's also just really entertaining to read, with a style that I'm finding it difficult to compare to anybody else's.

This is the first thing of Klosterman's I've read, which seems like something of an oversight. It's definitely not going to be the last, though. I already have his But What If We're Wrong? on the TBR shelves, and I'm now quite looking forward to it. ( )