How America's Most Influential Generation Changed Everything
February 26, 2007
After Croker (No Greater Courage
) notes that boomers are those born between 1946 and 1964, his panel of 31 "experts" (Julian Bond, Eve Ensler, Erica Jong, Tony Snow and David Gergen, among them) remind readers of formative events of the boomer past—Vietnam, JFK, civil rights, drugs, the sexual revolution, etc. Then they move on to the boomer present, the world of work, where boomers have stretched the 9-to-5 workday to 24/7, invented telecommuting and digitized everything. In the third section, Croker's experts speculate about how boomers will change our notions of retirement and old age. All the clichés about this generation are included: "Any real Boomer can easily flash back in time and find himself sitting on the living room floor absolutely mesmerized by those beloved Saturday Morning Cartoons" and "here is not a genuine Boomer around today who cannot sing word-for-word and note-for-note about two dozen Beatles songs." Presumably, the PBS documentary this is supposed to accompany will have music or news footage to liven it up—but pages and pages of talking heads delivering sound bites doesn't add up to a particularly engaging reading experience.