What Really Happened to the Class of '93: Start-ups, Dropouts, and Other Navigations Through an Untidy Decade - Hardcover

Colin, Chris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0767914791 ISBN 13: 9780767914796

Publisher: Broadway, 2004

Synopsis

The homecoming queen, the teen mom, the scientist, the wallflower, the flirt, the discipline case, and the homophobe—how did a decade marked by impeachment, a dot-com bubble, 9/11, and war shake their lives?
 
The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology’s class of '93 graduated into an era of unprecedented optimism. The Soviet Union had collapsed, Clinton was pre-Monica, and rumors were spreading about a thing called the Internet. For young people stepping out into the world for the first time, America hummed with promise. Just ten years later, that promise has collapsed into uncertainty, and the class of '93—nearly in their thirties now—finds itself struggling to make sense of all that's happened.

In the year leading up to his ten-year reunion, journalist Chris Colin tracked down his former classmates and asked them to pull back the curtains on their lives. Sometimes what he discovered was a swath of American history, other times simply frank and arresting accounts of how people fall in love, or steady their nerves on hills in Kosovo, or fall on their knees before God, or find out biology had handed them the wrong gender, and otherwise lurch into adulthood. And when the Thomas Jefferson class of '93 finally reconvenes for the reunion itself —after the very core of their country seems to have been shaken—Colin finds that maybe he and his classmates never left high school behind in the first place.

For all that's been said about the dramatic years straddling the turn of the twenty-first century, little has been observed about those who actually came of age in that time. For the Class of '93, unbridled optimism gave way to bewilderment, peace to war, and happiness sometimes to tragedy. From these stories emerges a picture of an era and the intensely candid story of a few lives taking shape in the midst of it.

About this title

About the Author

CHRIS COLIN is a former editor and writer for Salon. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, McSweeney’s, and various anthologies. He lives in San Francisco.

Review

“No matter what generation we belong to, we all measure ourselves against our former high school classmates. Chris Colin, one of his generation's most talented new voices, offers us a look at his class of '93 that is alternately funny, dismaying, touching and inspiring. He reunites with his old classmates to ask them the probing questions we wish we could ask at our own high school reunions: who really were you -- underneath your label of class nerd, nympho, clown, jock or queen -- and who really are you today?”—David Talbot, Founder and Editor in Chief, Salon.com

“We know one thing about the current generation of twenty-somethings: They have no clear road signs to direct them into adulthood. The question of how to live a good life is up for grabs and that makes the stories told in "What Really Happened to the Class of '93" so damn interesting. Faced with such unprecedented freedom, some have thrived, creating lives that are expressions of their personality. Others have frozen-up or worse. Colin does us all a service by avoiding the standard stereotypes and giving his generation new and complex stories to tell.” –Ethan Watters, author of Urban Tribes: A Generation Redefines Friendship, Family and Commitment

"With this book, Chris Colin exorcises the demons of high school, something we all wish we'd done a long time ago. Is it already appropriate to write nostalgically about 1993? Lord, I'm old."--Neal Pollack, author of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and Never Mind The Pollacks

Edition details

• Publisher: Broadway
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0767914791
• ISBN 13: 9780767914796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304