The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way.And It Wasn't My Fault.And I'll Never Do It Again

by P.J. O'Rourke

P.J. O’Rourke began writing funny things in 1960s “underground” newspapers, became editor-in-chief of National Lampoon, then spent 20 years reporting for Rolling Stone and The Atlantic Monthly as the world’s only trouble spot humorist, going to wars, riots, rebellions, and other “Holidays in Hell” in more than 40 countries.
Now O’Rourke, born at the peak of the Baby Boom, turns his keen eye on himself and his 75 million accomplices in making America what it is today. With laughter as an analytical tool, he uses his own very average, if sometimes uproarious experiences as a key to his exceptional age cohort. He writes about the way the post-war generation somehow came of age by never quite growing up and created a better society by turning society upside down.
THE BABY BOOM: How it Got That Way… And It Wasn’t My Fault… And I’ll Never Do It Again is at once a social history, a group memoir of collectively impaired memory, a hilarious attempt to understand his generation’s messy hilarity, and a celebration of the mess the Baby Boom has made.

Genres: Humor, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Memoir, Cultural, American History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 7, 2014

About the author

Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke is an American political satirist, journalist, writer, and author. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!. Since 2011 O'Rourke has been a columnist at The Daily Beast. In the United Kingdom, he is known as the face of a long-running series of television advertisements for British Airways in the 1990s.

He is the author of 20 books, of which his latest, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault) (And I’ll Never Do It Again), was released January 2014. This was preceded on September 21, 2010, by Don't Vote! – It Just Encourages the Bastards, and on September 1, 2009, Driving Like Crazy with a reprint edition published on May 11, 2010. According to a 60 Minutes profile, he is also the most quoted living man in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Humorous Quotations.

Reviews

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can only say that O'Rourke is telling it like it was and making me laugh and think at each memory he evokes.

According to O'Rourke's definition, I'm a Senior Boomer, born in 1947, and my son is a Freshman, born in 1964. (Yes, I was seventeen, it WAS the sixties.) I've had the experience of both being a boomer and raising one.

O'Rourke goes into detail laying out the differences between the Seniors, Juniors, Sophomores, and Freshmen of the Baby Boom. He says: "The Freshmen didn't witness the monumental Civil Rights Movement. They were taught that it was monumental in school. ...to the Freshmen, racism, sexism, and homophobia are as much slurs as facts."

Don't worry. He doesn't forget the humor. President Obama is a Freshman. Remember the controversy surrounding his controversial Chicago Minister, the Reverend Wright? O'Rourke reminds us "Senator Obama was sitting in the congregation but there's no indication he was paying any attention to Reverend Wright at all." As a Freshman, he was probably fiddling with his Blackberry.

If you're a Baby Boomer you'll love this book. It's part memoir, part history, part philosophy, and as you can count on from P.J. O'Rourke, fun to read and share.

[Michael Wiggins · Rating 2 out of 5]

PJ O'Rourke is one of my all time favorite writers, so I was eager to read his latest work. I am disappointed in this effort for many reasons.
First, it rehashes more than a few previously told tales, though sometimes in a cursory sort of way, as if he knows we know that he's repeating himself. The stories illustrate some of his points, of course, but if the main point is, "what a self-absorbed cretin I was," the reader probably picks up on that early on.
I am also put off by the rather different lessons he seems to draw from his baby boomer experience than he describes in earlier, more conservative books. I can't help but think that if the country hadn't taken an awful lurch to the left a few years ago, the old PJ might have reappeared.
Ultimately, I can't believe how completely he absolves the plain old neediness of the worst of his generation, even as we suffer from its consequences right now.
Naturally, a person of a different political persuasion may feel differently, which I understand. My point is that once I felt my politics meshed with at least one gifted writer. Now I'm just not sure.

[Clif Hostetler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book attempts “to capture the spirit of a generation of God’s favorite spoiled brats.” In case you're unaware of which brats are being referred to, it's the Baby Boom Generation (born between 1946-1964 ) . This is an autobiography of the author's younger years filled with overstatement in an effort at humor about growing up circa 1950s and 60s." Since this generation never grew up, the story continues on to the present.

The author is two years younger than me, so I found some of his experiences similar to my own. But of course it's one person's story filled with sweeping generalizations about his own and other so-called "generations." It's all delivered in the style of a stand-up comedy routine and not intended to be a scholarly sociology paper.

One significant difference between his life and mine is that he used the alphabet song for learning the alphabet. When I learned the alphabet in school, nobody taught us the song. I always assumed that was because the song wasn't composed yet. But Wikipedia.com says it was copyrighted in 1835. So I guess my rural two-room school was just so isolated that the song hadn't reached our part of the country. The author says he was doomed to sing the song whenever he searched an alphabetical listing. I was spared that curse.

The following story from the book is an example of the lengths our young selves went to in order to be cool during our teenage years. It's about a young man who wanted the correct song (Louie Louie) to be playing while he entered the restaurant door.

The restaurant had tables and booths inside, where we went when it was too cold to be cool outside. There was a sophomore we knew, driving around with us. He didn’t have his driver’s license. Leo convinced him to go into the burger restaurant and feed the jukebox so that the right sound track theme song would be playing when Leo walked through the door. Other kids had fed the jukebox. Twenty minutes passed before “Louie Louie” came on. We had to get up on our knees in the restaurant booth and frantically signal to Leo who was waiting in the car and had trouble seeing us through his sunglasses. By the time he got there the jukebox was playing “We’ll Sing in the Sunshine.”

As the book enters the so-called sixties the stories became less funny. It was the age of drugs, so-called free love, and anti-Vietnam War protests.

I have always been bothered by the term, "The Sixties" to refer to this time. It has always impressed me as an inaccurate description of when it happened. This book explains the problem with using this term in the following excerpt.

It was a decade without quality control. And it was not, of course, a decade. The “sixties” as they are popularly remembered--what might too well be called “The High Sixties”--was an episode of about seventy-two months’ duration that started in 1967 when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia and America’s various little bohemian enclaves such as Greenwich Village, Haight-Ashbury, Big Sur, and the finished basement at my house and came to an abrupt halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began.

Early in the book the author brags that when he was a kid nobody had peanut allergies or had heard of attention deficit disorder (ADD). But when his generation reached draft age the author and most of his friends flunked their physicals because of various ailments described in notes from their physician and stuffed into fat manila envelopes to be given to the Selective Service staff.

As the potential draftees were standing in their underwear and socks at the induction center waiting to be examined the author observed that:

All the guys wearing Gold Toe over the calf men's dress socks and boxer shorts were holding fat manila envelopes. All the guys wearing the kind of socks bought by the bag full at K-Mart and Y-front Hanes underpants that come up over your belly button were not. I suppose I should have noticed that the bourgeois pigs were hogging the fat manila envelopes.

Being drafted was a life or death matter for many of the draftees. The book tells of one of the author's acquaintances who was kicked out of college because of a prank (organized a scheme to flush all the toilets on campus at once). He lost his deferment, was drafted, and killed in Vietnam.

The newspaper and magazine headlines at the time gave the stereotypical image of the boomer generation as being all longhaired hippie drug addicts protesting in the street and distributing underground newspapers. The author certainly fit this stereotype. But we now know this to be an illusorily impression. Somebody out there must have voted for George W., and it couldn't have been aging hippies.

Additional Comment:
Aging Boomers were some of the strongest supporters for Trump.

[Ubiquitousbastard · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, this was a book about the Baby Boomers written by one of them (apparently) for one of them. I'm a Millenial, so obviously there is just a bit of a generation gap and I can't relate to the anecdotes of Boomer childhood. However, I think that this was a very frank telling of the circumstances and mindset of the Boomers, and I actually learned quite a bit that I hadn't known or put together previously. The generation is very unique among the recent generations, and very much different from their parents, the Greatest Generation. I found myself confused by Boomer logic on more than one occasion, but this makes sense as the author claims that Boomers are raised in households with too much love, permissive parenting, and extra money. I had none of that growing up, so it makes sense that I can't relate to the thought processes of a person or group that has had that.

What I didn't like at all was the ending. I had to fight through it as the author claimed that the Boomers were actually the best generation for America and the world, and that all of their selfish acts were for the best. After reading most of the book, I decided that they were actually the generation that ruined a lot of what I love about America and have put it on a path that I am not happy about. The author wrote the end well, it was just my absolute disagreement that made it so difficult to finish.

I received a copy for free from Goodreads First Reads.

[Melissa McShane · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this reflection on the Baby Boomer generation (of which O'Rourke is a senior member) P. J. O'Rourke veers between commenting on the nature of Baby Boomers in general and recounting his own childhood and adolescent and young adult experiences in specific. I was far more interested in his personal stories than his analysis of the impact Baby Boomers have had on society, because I think they're more revelatory in their lack of explicit analysis than when he talks about the politics of his generation. In describing, for example, the ways in which boys and girls of his generation interacted, it's clear that gender relations even in the '50s weren't as TV shows depicted them later.

I was a little surprised at his rewriting of history in one way: he's written about the "radical" newspaper he worked on in college, but in the past, he said it was called Harry and in this book the name becomes Puddles--but the story of how it got the name remains the same. So I'm not sure what was going on there.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I feel he either pulled his punches with the political analysis or tried to gloss over some of his generation's failings with humor, so I don't know that I'll want to re-read this one. Maybe just the bits about his childhood.

[Sidna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Thank goodness I finally finished this book! I'm not sure why I bothered to read all of it except that it was a gift to my husband from one of his sons. My husband really enjoyed reading it and thought I would like it, too. I didn't.

From the title the reader assumes that it will include general information about the Baby Boomers with some personal interest stories. Instead, it is the very detailed autobiography of one man who spent the sixties stoned on drugs and beer while trying to have sex with every girl who crossed his path. It might be the author's personal experience, but it is hardly the chronicle of an entire generation. Pat Conroy, my favorite author, is often accused of navel gazing, but he could take lessons from O'Rourke.

Part of the problem with the book is that O'Rourke tries too hard to put a humorous angle on every topic. I was familiar with O'Rourke's name, but had not read any of his other books and am not like to read one of them in the future.

My husband and I narrowly escaped being Baby Boomers. I was born in 1943 and my husband in 1945, the year before the official start of the Baby Boom. I've watched as the Boomers followed behind me through childhood and college into adulthood and I don't think they were all drunk and stoned throughout the '60's.

This book might appeal to male readers, as it did to my husband, but I found it to be a real bore.

[Koeeoaddi]

Sorry, Peej, it's not you, it's me. Well, to be honest, it's you, too. I think I've finally hit my Baby Boomer self referencial saturation point. Perhap the start of a new Boomer trend?

[Paul Pessolano · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Baby Boom” by P. J. O’Rourke, published by Atlantic Monthly Press.

Category – Humor/Satire Publication Date – January 07, 2014

It is very difficult to define this book, it is definitely humor, it is definitely political satire, it is definitely part biography, and it is definitely a little history.

A better definition of this book is in its subtitle, “How It Got That Way….And It Wasn’t My Fault….And I’ll Never Do It Again.”

O’Rourke believes, and he is part of the baby boom, that this period of time molded America into what it is today, for good or for bad. He is not beyond making fun of himself and the times. You belong to this generation if you were born between 1946 and 1964. This was a generation that was fostered by “The Greatest Generation” that came out of World War II. A generation that had money and time on its hands to explore the world around them, and had no problems with alcohol, drugs, music, and dress. They did what they believed in and could care less about what any one thought of their actions.

The book explores the “Baby Boomers” in respect to the political scene including the politicians and war, especially the Vietnam War. He adds his own personal experiences to the book which include an odd outlook on the sexual mores that changed from the 1940’s to the 1960’s. He also expounds on how “The Greatest Generation”, due to recession and war, let “The Baby Boomers” sort of run amuck because they wanted more for their children than what they had and had the money to do it.

A very interesting book, not only due to the historical and comedic parts, but one that provides a social explanation as to how this generation forged our society by doing things that bordered on the absurd.

[Dale Hansen · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are sections of this book that will definitely make you laugh, but stalls out towards the end. Part autobiography, part social commentary, it never quite delivers on both accounts. But does make you question the cultural significance of the Baby Boomers and whether its been good, bad or both, but to answer those questions you would have to look no further then the wacky amoral (where the ends always justify the means) political worlds of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, Barak Obama, and Donald J. Trump against the technological and material advances brought to us by people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others. Also interesting to note that many of the biggest names and influences in the sixties were not baby boomers at all, but part of the silent generation taking advantage of baby boomers.

[Laurel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had expected to really like this book because over the years I have enjoyed P.J. O'Rourke's writing. I clearly remember some of his satire in Rolling Stone Magazine going back 25+ years. He is pretty funny when he does a guest spot on "Wait, wait, don't tell me". I was very disappointed with his backward look at his childhood and young adult years, framed in the Baby-Boomer context. There were chuckles here and there, but most of it fell flat for me (a Baby-Boomer). A lot of his focus was on his "male" experiences, so perhaps if I was a man, I could have related and found more humor in his writing.

[Mr Salyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely wonderful!! O'Rourke offers a "no holds barred" look at what has shaped approximately 25% of today's America. His introspection provides a guide for all "Boomers" hoping to obtain a better understanding of self and circumstances, all the while maintaining a smile. Though often compared to others, Shepherd, Thompson, Buckwald, etc... O'Rourke is an original. As a freshman "Boomer", I would heartily recommend this to both "Boomers" and non-Boomers alike.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a really fun read, and would have been even more fun if I were a few years older and in his age bracket. But it brought back memories and made me realize why I am the person that I am (no apologies). For me, of course, the best part was reading about the Sixties (which he correctly defines as those years from 1967-1974). If you knew me back then, you'll enjoy this book.

[George Wehrle · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked his stories from the 80s, an example was his story in Panama. This is a story from personal with nothing to tell. Sad.

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 5 out of 5]

O'Rourke is absolutely brilliant in this book - but there may be some generational differences showing. Before I wrote this review, I read the others. A lot of the objections to the book come down to "I just don't get it."

O'Rourke divides the Boomers into four classes - Seniors, Juniors, Sophomores and Frosh. (The last ones born in 1964) I was born a senior (1946) - so many of the anecdotes were things that I either lived through or experienced. He makes two serious points. First, he argues that the arbitrary definition of a boomer is probably not useful - much of the experience that the seniors and juniors had - especially their proximity to WWII - was simply not there for the younger boomers. We were young adults when many of the transformative experiences were happening (the pill, drugs, changing roles, etc) but the younger ones grew into young adulthood only after many of those transitions had been made. Second, he argues that the Boomers actually did not do much - they have not had a particularly good record as political figures, they actually went to Woodstock but did not produce it. The anthems of the boomers were actually written mostly by people in the prior generation.

His descriptions of Margaret Mead and Ayn Rand are devastatingly funny. There are some passages that I simply wanted to go back and re-read several times. I am only going to offer one quote from the book - he describes the engineers who developed the Plymouth Valiant as "six guys who did not speak the same language and worked in total darkness." His interposition of great quotes and statistics about the generation are helpful in understanding the true impact of a generation that started with 70+ million members. So while he writes with humor he also has some significant substance.

If you were born in the first couple of years of the trend - say through the mid-1950s you will get all of this. And unless you lived in a cave during your first 30 years or are so far to the left or the right you cannot stand being poked fun at - you will enjoy this book. If you were born either much earlier or later than that you might still enjoy this latest piece from a writer who is arguably the greatest living American humorist.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

P.J. O’Rourke is in the doldrums. I couldn’t finish Peace Kills or Holidays in Heck; both read as if he were trying too hard to be funny with too-thin material—as opposed to Parliament of Whores, Holidays in Hell, and Eat the Rich, all of which are better because O’Rourke has more there with which to work. The Baby Boom isn’t terrible and three or four times it made me laugh out loud. But it’s not nearly as good as some of his other ones.

O’Rourke’s opening chapters are funny and reflect his attitude toward his subject, which is that boomers are everywhere and they won’t stop emoting. In one of his better moments, he states, “History is full of generations that had too many problems. We are the first generation to have too many answers.” But part of the reason why the book isn’t that great is explained in its very pages. Early on, O’Rourke says:

"The tip-off is the blather, the jabber, the prattle, the natter, the gab, gas, yak, yap, baloney. blarney, bunkum, the jaw-slinging, tongue-wagging, gum-beating chin music that is the Baby Boom’s gift to the world.”

The Baby Boom proves him correct: there’s too much blather, too much talking, too much of generalizations about the generation to make anything stick. Half of the book is a memoir of O’Rourke’s youth and half is an overview of the Boomer’s values and assumptions. He should have chosen one instead of doing both half-assed.

Finally, there’s the issue of the sound. Many paragraphs follow this model:

There’s a long opening topic sentence in which O’Rourke says something about something. And then a shorter one. And then another. And one more. And one more. And then a punch line that’s not so great.

This gets as old as a Boomer talking about what a good time he had in college. I wish he had written a flat-out memoir. Skip this one unless you happened to grab it in the library or need something to read as the kids get their haircuts.

[Albert Stern · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been a fan for more than 35 years, and have been reading versions of the stories in this book for about that long. I can see why some people are saying there is nothing new here (and truly in the last 1/5th of the book he palpably runs out of energy), but it's so incisive and goes down so easy, that I think it earns a higher rating than some are giving it.

My disappointment with it is that he leaves his story as his life is on the verge of getting objectively interesting. Surely there are insights about his generation that he gleaned while working with comic minds like Doug Kenny and John Hughes, or with machers like Jan Wenner. Why not focus some on his time in charge of National Lampoon, or in the journalistic big time at Rolling Stone and the Atlantic. The Puddles magazine stories are funny, but low hanging fruit I would think compared to the things he experienced as one of the premiere writers of the Baby Boom. He has been a big deal and been doing big things for about 40 years - surely, there is relevant material about the Baby Boom to be mined from his brilliant career and not just from tales of adolescent wanking and drinking.

He had his generation figured out early on. I still have my copy of the Lampoon's high school yearbook from the 70s, and it can still make me laugh out loud. I wish I could find a copy of the newspaper parody.

I hope this isn't his grand summation on the subject - I really want a proper memoir describing the fullness of his experiences. What did success feel like? How did the big time change as boomers took over? He ended up marrying Sidney Lumet's daughter/Lena Horne's granddaughter - surely, there must be stories about the life that took him into that world that are more interesting than not being able to feel up girls in high school. There is a lot more about the boomer experience he could (and should) write about.

[Athan Tolis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an author that can have you rolling on the floor with laughter, but this is a different kind of book. It's an autobiography of sorts. Or rather, it's the story of how the baby boomers grew up and got to be how they are. P.J. O'Rourke can't help being funny, of course, so if any other author had written this I would consider it entertaining.

Thing is, for him the bar is higher and he misses it. The time would be better spent re-reading the CEO of the Sofa, for example. I like books to teach me, to entertain me and to make me think, so if he's only going to score on one of the three fronts he needs to do it at the usual P.J. O'Rourke standard.

The other thing is that I don't believe he could have been as big a goof in his youth as he claims in this book. The proof is how amazing a command of the Greek (yes, Greek!) language he displays when he goes through the etymology of all the words he chooses to describe his generation. When exactly did he learn his Greek if not during his allegedly wasted youth?

On the other hand, this is not a bad book. I may not have discovered much about the author here, but I feel like I might have come to understand Bill Clinton better. From halfway through the book I kind of felt he was always there in the background, the archetypal baby boomer, picking the low-hanging fruit and feeling real good about himself. Funny thing is, he barely gets mentioned, if at all.

So perhaps it's one of those cases where you reference ten books but not the one you used as a source. Maybe P.J. O'Rourke has done it again. But probably not. It's probably just me thinking that.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect P.J. A must-read.

[Philtrum · Rating 3 out of 5]

This, the 20th book by political humourist, Patrick Jake "P. J." O'Rourke (born 1947), is about the American post–World War II baby boom (1946–1964), a period during which over 78 million Americans were born.

It’s mainly an autobiography of sorts. O’Rourke ties a lot the events from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s to his own life and experiences.

It’s also a sociological/psychological treatise of sorts. He builds up a picture of the typical ‘boomer’, an egocentric toddler, growing very little – other than around the waist ��� as he enters his 60s.

And it’s a humorous book, because O’Rourke is a witty, intelligent, thoughtful guy, and, I suspect, he could write a funny book about shopping lists or dog poop.

I enjoyed this, and laughed out loud in places.

What disappointed me, though, and I suspect O’Rourke himself would own up to this, is that there’s no pay-off at the end, no startling insight. His conclusion, such as it is, is that boomers are so selfish, so egocentric, so caught up in their own desires and thoughts, that they care so little for others and the world around them, that they’ve been responsible for starting less wars than previous generations.

So, by the end, in common parlance, I was left feeling somewhat ‘meh’. Which, appropriately, as a boomer myself, is perhaps as it should be.

6/10

[Mary · Rating 2 out of 5]

I generally steer clear of books by humourists or satirists. I find most of them to be pompous and far too proud of their cleverness, and in this, the author did not disappoint. However, the title of this book intrigued me, being a Baby Boomer myself, and I picked it up to read it. The author says we are a generation that grew up with, and continues to crave "happiness, attention, affection, freedom, irresponsibility, money, peace, opportunity..." and that much of the craziness in society is a result of Baby Boomer influence. For example, he states that the baby boom unleashed the "safety hysteria" on the world, one example of which is a step ladder with so many warning labels on it that there should be one that just says don't use it at all. I think the flaw in this statement is that the "safety hysteria" wasn't unleashed because we cared it he fell off the ladder and killed himself, but rather, out of the fear of being sued because of it!! While there were some amusing anecdotes and observations that elicited a chuckle from me, mostly I found the book to be a self-indulgent glorification of the author's halcyon days in the sixties. In the book he says that the Baby Boomers "have the enormous power of bullshit." This book is the proof.

[Mary Karpel-Jergic · Rating 1 out of 5]

I must be honest here - I have not completed this book. I begun (had enjoyed quite a few of O'Rourke's previously) but at page 109 I put it down, picked up another book and have just continued to pick up other books. So it didn't capture me I'm afraid and I am going to disregard it. Unusual for me. I think I may have tired of his self deprecating style and wry observations.
"History is full of generations that had too many problems. We are the first generation to have too many answers" Are we? It doesn't feel that way to me - a baby boomer.

"Facts are faint things next to feelings. Facts are acknowledged, feelings are felt."

"the people who insist on organising life are the people who have no idea how life is organised were and always will be the same people." As always he's good with political asides.

"The Baby Boom has engaged in all sorts of things. And we consider ourselves so relevant to the world that we think we can stop rising sea levels by separating the glass from the plastic in our trash"

I think what I once thought funny I now think is glib. Or perhaps he's been writing to the same formulaic model for too long.

[Kevinjwoods · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the latest book by a famous american humorist, (btw famous american humorist is defined in an update of a book by the star of From Dusk till Dawn 3 as someone who critics find hilarious but everyone else needs to have explained to them using diagrams and an encyclopaedia) about the experience of growing up in the 50's and 60's and is thus incredibly inciteful and memory inducing to any Baby Boomers out there of which I am not one of them so it came across as one of those you had to be there things which is aimed at the type of person who wasn't actually there and has no interest in knowing what it is like there, and while occasionally extremely funny the insights just aren't that insightful if you treat it as cultural commentary, if however you treat it a autobiography it makes more sense.

[Anne Fabing · Rating 2 out of 5]

Written by one of the Baby Boomers from the beginning of that generation, the author reminisces about the 50's and 60's and how important his generation was to the moral and financial history of America. He laments about the generations previous to his - the Silent and the Great generations and how little they contributed anything of importance. As a boomer born in 1962, I can relate very little to the recollections of his youth. He offers no impressions for those of us born near the end whose memories of youth occurred in 70's and early 80's. If you are looking for a trip down memory lane and were born before 1955 than this book would probably be a pleasurable read. For the rest of us, it's a pass.

[Sue · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh...
P.J. obviously lived in a different monetary and intellectually privileged status of the 50's [than moi]. Some things I could relate too, more things not. Being a girl to woman baby-boomer was markedly different from being male during that time.
Here's the deciding difference, for any age:
When boys hit puberty they ejaculate and have an orgasm. It's all, "Let's have fun and touch things!" When girls reach puberty, there's all that bleeding and pain and fear of pregnancy. Girls are forced into responsibility immediately. Orgasm isn't guaranteed.
So, men aren't really from Mars, they're essentially still running around the playground.... And from the sound of this book, smoking pot and writing flippantly silly prose.

[Bill Pritchard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've never understood the 60's. It has always been my belief that I was not allowed to since I was not a "Baby Boomer". After reading The Baby Boom by P.J. O'Rourke, I have found evidence that I was right. I am not a boomer - I am a bit too young to claim this wonderful title. O'Rourke rambles through this work spinning cynical stories of his growing up. Admittedly, I laughed out loud at least once in each sitting. But overall I am not sure what I was supposed to take away from this work. Not knowing what to look for (since I am not a boomer) I will guess that this work is thoughtful... but I will leave it to a Baby Boomer to tell us if that is the case.

[David R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

O'Rourke has, as is his style, a great deal of fun with contemporary ideas, and in this book lampoons the "Baby Boom" cohort of which he is a member. The initial material, in the form of Boomers growing up in the 1950s is razor-sharp and a lot of fun. Unfortunately things decline a great deal. The chapters on Boomers in the 60s are flabby and pointless (e.g., yes, you took drugs too much. How nice!) and what follows: Boomers today, was most uninteresting. It didn't really end with much, either. I would have liked P.J. to take another crack at the second half and show what he can do when completely inspired.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy of this book through Goodreads First Reads giveaways. O'Rourke doesn't disappoint in this humorous, social history/memoir/political science book. First and foremost I read O'Rourke for his sense of humor, and this look at his own generation is full of his brand of sarcasm as well as fond nostalgia for a time gone by (at least as much of it as he can remember). I'm not a boomer, but I found myself recognizing, and relating to, the overall/stereotypical generational traits expounded on in this book and laughing out loud at the funny situations in this book.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining read that is more memoir than anything else. That's okay, though, because O'Rourke keeps it light and fun. About half the book centers on the author's childhood exploits, and generalizes those exploits to include all Boomers. He's upfront about his admiration for his own generation, an admiration I'm not sure is entirely warranted. The thing with O'Rourke, though, is that you never know when and if he's really serious. As he admits up front, after all, he is full of crap. Keep that in mind, don't take the book too seriously, and you'll probably enjoy it.

[Leslie · Rating 2 out of 5]

What would happen if one our great satirists wrote a book about the Baby Boom generation while drinking enough coffee to stay awake for 48 consecutive hours ? This book fits the bill. There are good moments at the beginning of the book, but then it becomes a rambling mess. I'm still hoping someone writes a full-length book (O'Rourke's is only 258 pages with huge print and acres of white) satirizing the Baby Boomers. O'Rourke could have done it easily (based on his incredible body of satire, especially for the "National Lampoon"), but chose not to.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

P. J. O'Rourke revels in revealing how the Baby Boomer generation shaped the world. He sets the stage by laying out the generation that produced the Baby Boomers and looking at the nurture/nature combination in all its excess. He has fun laying blame on the "Silent Generation" for the world the Baby Boomers inherited while faulting his generation for "using up all the weird" and leaving nothing for future generations. Plenty of lists and interesting stories. If you liked earlier O'Rourke books, chances are good that you will enjoy The Baby Boom!