Rejuvenile Kickball Cartoons Cupcakes Reinvention
Once upon a time, boys and girls grew up and set apart childlike things. Nowadays, moms and dads skateboard alongside their kids and download the latest pop-song ringtones. Captains of industry pose for the cover of BusinessWeek keeping Super Soakers. The intermediate age of video game players is twenty-nine and rising. Top chefs manufacture recipes for Easy-Bake Ovens. Disney World is the world’s top adult vacation destination (that’s adults without kids). And young persons delay marriage and childbirth longer than ever in portion to keep family indebtednesses from interfering with their fun fun fun.
Christopher Noxon has coined a word for this new breed of grown-up: rejuveniles. And as a self-confessed rejuvenile, he’s a sympathetic yet critical guide to this bright and shiny world of humans who see growing up as “winding down”—exchanging a life of playful flexibleness for anxious days tending lawns and mutual funds.
In Rejuvenile, Noxon explores the historical roots of today’s rejuveniles (hint: all roads lead to Peter Pan), the “toyification” of practical widgets (car cuteness is at an all-time high), and the new gospel of play. He talks to parents who love cartoons more than their children do, twenty-somethings who live happily with their parents, and grown-ups who evangelize on behalf of all-ages tag and Legos. And he takes on the “Harrumphing Codgers,” who see the rejuvenile as a threat to the social order.
Noxon tempers stories of his and others’ rejuvenile tendencies with cautionary notes when it comes to “lost souls whose taste for childlike things is creepy at best.” (Exhibit A: Michael Jackson.) On balance, though, he sees rejuveniles as optimists and capital-R Romantics, people driven by a desire “to hold on to the part of ourselves that feels the most genuinely human. We believe in play, in make believe, in learning, in naps. And in a time of deep uncertainty, we trust that this deeper, more adaptable part of ourselves is our best tool of survival.”
Fresh and delightfully contrarian, Rejuvenile makes hilarious sense of this seismic culture change. It’s necessary reading not only for grown-ups who refuse to “act their age,” but for those who wish they would just grow up.
From the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers WeeklyAccording to journalist Noxon, rejuveniles-adults who use childhood past-times as “a way of preserving wonder, trust, and ridiculousness in a world where these calibers are many times in short supply”-are proliferating, and not similar to other books on the topic of “kidults” (aka “twixters,” “boomerangers,” and “generation debt”), his book says this is largely good. Viewing the bright side of oft-bemoaned proof showing increasing numbers of young adults living with parents and postponing marriage, Noxon has made an agreeably diverting but not complete read. In appropriately playful prose, he considers successful adults who play in rock n’ roll nursery rhyme cover bands, attend Disney World without kids, and happily plunk down 10 bucks to see Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie. Avoiding “The Downside of Now” until the end, Noxon almost admits that he isn’t telling the whole story of the rejuveniles: though it’s “nice to think of rejuveniles as freethinking romantics,” which he theretofore does, “it’s clear that outside forces also have a hand in shaping who rejuveniles are.” Those outside forces? Not crushing student loans, a stagnant occupation market or political age-bias, but “the media.” Of course, Noxon would in all likelihood just as soon leave worrying to grown-ups of the old school-he’ll be on the kickball field instead.
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Review“I read Rejuvenile excitedly, eager to get to Noxon’s conclusions, sentiment over and over that he was describing something I sensed was there but hadn’t rather put into words. An eye-opener.” —Ira Glass, host of public radio’s This American Life
“Geezers wearing blue jeans and looking at cartoons and playing videogames is not incisively what Bob Dylan had in mind (‘May you stay for a limitless time young’) back in the countercultural day. But as Christopher Noxon smartly and definitively explains, never-ending youthfulness—that is, the mass refusal to swear off fun and ease for the sake of grown-up propriety—is the enduring bequest of the Woodstock generation.” —Kurt Andersen, host of public radio’s Studio 360 and author of Turn of the Century
“Rejuvenile is better than any book out there in regards to play. It sweeps together stories of real people being unfeigned to their core selves. This is not a book for escapists; it is a book for curious open explorers looking to lead more effective, flexible, adaptive, vital, and still responsible lives.” —Stuart L. Brown, M.D., founder and president, the Institute for Play
“Any book that inspires me to rediscover Four Square and Duck Duck Goose is A-OK with me. Rejuvenile made me want to play and it made me think—a stellar combination. Thank you, Christopher, for giving us a conception we actually need: a new, liberating redefinition of adulthood, where you may be a responsible grown-up and still maintain a sense of wonder.” —Sasha Cagen, author of Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics
“With Rejuvenile, Christopher Noxon brilliantly charts the continual turning of the Boomers, X’ers and Y’ers away from the brittle authority of work-obsessed adulthood. We badly need more playful times, and Rejuvenile will aid us get there.” —Pat Kane, author of The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living
“Christopher Noxon has the same affection for the ingenuous adults he describes as they do for their Ninja Turtles, skateboards, and Lego blocks. Noxon is an avid aggregator in his own right—one of compelling characters, funny stories, and perceptivenesses that speak to our mixed-up times.” —Ethan Watters, former Chuck E. Cheese Rat and author of Urban Tribes: Are Friends the New Family?
From the Hardcover edition.
About the AuthorChristopher Noxon has written for The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, and Salon. He lives with his wife and three children in Los Angeles.
From the Hardcover edition.
Rejuvenile Kickball Cartoons Cupcakes Reinvention Image
Rejuvenile Kickball Cartoons Cupcakes Reinvention Image
Rejuvenile Kickball Cartoons Cupcakes Reinvention Image
Rejuvenile Kickball Cartoons Cupcakes Reinvention Picture
Most helpful client reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
 Great Insights, Great Research, Great Read
By Jason Kotecki
I read this book over the course of various flights while journeying and I exhaustively enjoyed it. As a cartoonist who likes cupcakes and wearing superhero t-shirts, there ought to be no surprise why the book peaked my interest. But I was delighted to find that the book was neither an unstructured permission slip for irresponsible behavior, nor a “Harrumphing Codger” treatise on abolishing all forms of fun from life. Rather, it was a well-organized, even-handed, thoughtful and interesting approach on the phenomenon itself. I enjoyed the historical research, and even though from time to time overly thourough, offered a lot of interesting background for the rest of the book. I likewise enjoyed the profiles of the humans allround the book. At times I found myself mentally cheering them on, while with others, I tended to react to with feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized (and occasionally even disgust). So ultimately, the book connected with me on an aroused level, and it made me think. Something all good books do.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Are you a Rejuvenile?
By JLP
When I purchased my new Nikon D2X, a pro level camera, I couldn’t wait to get it home and undertake it out. I went to Central Park even even though the weather conditions were crappy for photography. That level of pleasure and enjoyment was the same if not more outstanding than getting that new set of legos when I was ten for my birthday. I’m a rejuvenile. If you’ve watched the cartoon network with or without children present and enjoyed it then you are one too. Christopher Noxon documents a trend in adults that is much wider disseminate than you might think. In delightfully well written prose, Noxon documents the respective types of rejuvenile and their respective activities. You have adults who participate in kickball (the author is one of them and met his wife through that activity), still watch cartoons, gather and . . . yes . . . even play with action figures, read comic books or graphic novels and other such activenesses shared by ten year olds. Then there are the 32 year old children who move back with their parents, women who diligently gather the very highpriced Madame Alexander dolls and other perchance less evident examples of rejuvenilia. Noxon ponders on the both the positive and negative distinct features of this sociological trend. Clearly he believes it is overall positive and lambasts the critics. There is plainly a spectrum of rejuvenileness and the more uttermost surely gave me reason to pause (the adults playing with action figures and even more outré examples.) It seems to be impacting all levels of society – how adults raise and relate to their children, how those children are maturing and the respective industries fed by these trends thence it isn’t all fun and games. The book is a very interesting read that I highly commend it.
2 of 2 persons found the following review helpful.
Buy this book
By Granny6
Rejuvenile is my new bestloved book–smart, funny, wondrous written. Noxon’s forte is finding amazingly quirky persons who illustrate his thesis and describing them in delicious detail. The last section, “Into a Rejuvenile Future,” ties it all together. “[W]e rejuveniles are attempting to hang on to the share of ourselves that feels most veritably human,” Noxon writes, and we can’t support but celebrate our own inner senses of wonder and curiosity and the delightful and thought provoking journeying this writer takes us on.
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