The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture Audiobook (Free)

A witty, intelligent cultural background from NPR reserve critic Glen Weldon explains Batman’s rises and falls throughout the ages-and what his tale tells us about ourselves.

Since his creation, Batman has been a lot of things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop-art feeling; a pointy-eared professional spy; and a grim and gritty ninja from the urban night. For more than three quarters of a hundred years, he provides cycled from a physique of darkness to one of lightness and again; he’s a about The Caped Crusade: Batman as well as the Rise of Nerd Lifestyle bat-shaped Rorschach inkblot who assumes the many meanings our changing culture projects onto him. How exactly we perceive Batman’s character, whether he’s providing dire threats inside a raspy Christian Bale growl or trading blithely homoerotic double-entendres with partner Robin in the comics page, talks to who we are and how we wish to be seen by the world. It’s this endlessly mutable quality that has made him therefore enduring.

And it’s Batman’s fundamental nerdiness-his devices, his obsession, his oath, even his insufficient superpowers-that uniquely resonates with his fans who feel a fiercely protective like for the type. Today, fueled by the web, that variety of enthusiasm for elements of popular culture is just about everywhere. Which is why is Batman an ideal lens by which to understand geek tradition, its current recognition, and social significance.

In The Caped Crusade, with humor and insight, Glen Weldon, publication critic for NPR and author of Superman: The Unauthorized Biography, lays out Batman’s seventy-eight-year cultural history and shows how he has helped help to make us who we are today and just why his legacy remains so solid.