“Today’s university students sign up for tree planting, a three month stint in horsefly country, and come back to their parents’ comfortable manses acting as if they’d just parachuted into Bhagdad on a solo mission to steal Saddam Hussein’s favourite cravat.” (Page 213)

I vacillated between enjoying this book and loathing it, between interest and boredom. The basic premise is this: the cult of individuality predominant in our culture has become the new conformity. Hal Niedzviecki proposes distils the search for meaning into a quest for fulfillment through pop culture.

This is probably my greatest frustration with the book. Intially, I found the ideas and particularly, the examples, fascinating. Niedzviecki explores all manner of pop culture phenomena from backyard wrestling to American Idol, from orthodox religion to island hippy communities.

Where he started to lose me was when he attempted to tie all of this in with various philosophical writers. Perhaps someone better versed in Western Philosophy would have found this more interesting, but that person is not me.

Worse, Niedzviecki openly scorns Eastern Philosophy as New Age mumbo jumbo and suggests that ‘connectivity, order and higher meaning’ is not possible. Throughout the book, this seems to be a theme and it grated on me after awhile.

He’s also very cynical; very funny at times, but it occasionally gets annoying.

I appreciated the Canadian cultural references throughout the book and I learned tonnes about various obscure pop culture trends that I would have never heard of otherwise. This book is worth a read, but skim the boring parts.