THE NAUGHTY NINETIES

David Friend's lively and authoritative study of millennial vulgarity and sleaze is (among other things) an excellent primer for the Age of Trump.

How I loved this book! THE NAUGHTY NINETIES is a raucous ride through the 20th century’s closing decade—an impressive sweep of social and cultural history in an era dominated by instant communication and gratification that presages our turbulent times. David Friend brilliantly captures the social and sexual revolution that came home to roost in the 1990s and left little to the imagination!

In-your-face sexuality goes mainstream in this rollicking history of a lubricious decade. [A] thoughtful and entertaining account of the era. Vivid. Friend presents an insightful and compulsively readable overview of America's hormonal coming of age.

This thoughtful and ridiculously entertaining book will surely solidify the '90s as America's most embarrassing decade.

This is a rare literary gift: living, breathing history that is also a page turner, written with elegant candor and humor and passion that jump off the page. Amazing. Fabulous. I can’t say enough about this book.

A superb and important book. A guiltily entertaining, impressively scholarly, and often laugh-out-loud witty account of the decade that ended a century—and millennium—with more than a few bangs. THE NAUGHTY NINETIES is a fascinating study of how popular culture became, in the phrasing of one of its many nadir moments, a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty—and went south from there.

A brilliantly researched and uproariously written romp through the sex-fueled Age of Clinton. Nothing is off-limits: Viagra, Brazilian wax jobs, home-brewed pornography, Fox News, O.J. Simpson, and the birth of reality TV are all expertly grabbed by the scruff of the neck. An instant American Studies classic!

Written with wit, zest, and subtlety, this is cultural history at its best. I'd lived through the decade, but not until I'd read THE NAUGHTY NINETIES did I come to appreciate how boldly, and creepily, those years had foreshadowed the messy and bewildering moment we are in now.

A saucy, outrageous...delicious new book.

An exhaustive, insightful exploration of America's obsession with its own horny self.

Sweeping. This ebullient book [is] written with great brio and tenacious attention.