Is the 1990s really history? James Brooke-Smith takes a look back at the decade that helps redefine how we remember

I remember 50 years ago coming home from high school with a book of modern history. My mum looked at it aghast. “That’s not history! I was alive then.” She was, as was I in the 1990s. Alive, aware, and active. So my initial approach to this history of that decade was somewhat skeptical. What can someone tell me that I didn’t already know?

Turns out, quite a lot. A teacher of English and Film Studies at the University of Ottawa, the author is delightfully eclectic and repeatedly informed as he tackles subjects from English soccer to Christian fundamentalism, post-modernism to international terrorism. He’s honest, sometimes genuinely funny, always intelligent and interesting, usually wise.

He frames the era with the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89 and the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001. I’d never really considered that. But, as he emphasizes, a decade is just that — an arbitrary collection of ten years. The world doesn’t automatically change because of an unnatural statement of chronology. Millennial fanatics proved that well enough.

What the ’90s did do, and this is something the book describes rather well, is provide a question: Were the ’90s a time of relative ease, moderation, and reasonable world leadership, setting the pattern for the future; or a time to breathe deeply before we submerged once again?

As should be the case with all good history, Brooke-Smith doesn’t give ironclad predictions or draw too many conclusions. Good Lord, even history itself isn’t immutable, and the reputations of past leaders and events change as schools of history develop. We see history through the prism of experience.

There’s inevitably a certain filmic influence in the book but that’s no bad thing. Movies shape minds, and minds shape movies. What we watch on the screen both reflects and shapes our time. If I do have a criticism, it’s that there’s simply too much taken on in a medium-length book. To cover the 1490s in a single volume is one thing, the 1990s quite another. The amount of material available is voluminous beyond number, so it’s unavoidable that just as we’re introduced to Red Bull, modern racism, urban music, or new age travellers, we have to move on. Rather like following the butterfly, it’s almost always intriguing but there’s little time to stop and wonder.

But that’s, as I say, unavoidable, and the author makes no claims of being definitive. Indeed, that would be an absurd and imploding boast. This is information and brief dissection, inviting readers to go further independently. “The exercise of historical memory faces new challenges in the twenty-first century,” he writes. “Drowning as we are in digital information, it is harder than ever for us to sift signal from noise.” This is good, very good. We once knew too little, now know so much. Too much? No, that can never be the case, but the issue is what is worth knowing and what takes us away from truth? I’m very glad I got to know this book.

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