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Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster
Baby Boomers (and I confess I am one): prepare to squirm and shake your increasingly arthritic little fists. For here comes essayist Helen Andrews.
--Terry Castle
With two recessions and a botched pandemic under their belt, the Boomers are their children's favorite punching bag. But is the hatred justified? Is the destruction left in their wake their fault or simply the luck of the generational draw?
In Boomers, essayist Helen Andrews addresses the Boomer legacy with scrupulous fairness and biting wit. Following the model of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, she profiles six of the Boomers' brightest and best. She shows how Steve Jobs tried to liberate everyone's inner rebel but unleashed our stultifying digital world of social media and the gig economy. How Aaron Sorkin played pied piper to a generation of idealistic wonks. How Camille Paglia corrupted academia while trying to save it. How Jeffrey Sachs, Al Sharpton, and Sonya Sotomayor wanted to empower the oppressed but ended up empowering new oppressors.
Ranging far beyond the usual Beatles and Bill Clinton clichés, Andrews shows how these six Boomers' effect on the world has been tragically and often ironically contrary to their intentions. She reveals the essence of Boomerness: they tried to liberate us, and instead of freedom they left behind chaos.
With two recessions and a botched pandemic under their belt, the Boomers are their children's favorite punching bag. But is the hatred justified? Is the destruction left in their wake their fault or simply the luck of the generational draw?
In Boomers, essayist Helen Andrews addresses the Boomer legacy with scrupulous fairness and biting wit. Following the model of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, she profiles six of the Boomers' brightest and best. She shows how Steve Jobs tried to liberate everyone's inner rebel but unleashed our stultifying digital world of social media and the gig economy. How Aaron Sorkin played pied piper to a generation of idealistic wonks. How Camille Paglia corrupted academia while trying to save it. How Jeffrey Sachs, Al Sharpton, and Sonya Sotomayor wanted to empower the oppressed but ended up empowering new oppressors.
Ranging far beyond the usual Beatles and Bill Clinton clichés, Andrews shows how these six Boomers' effect on the world has been tragically and often ironically contrary to their intentions. She reveals the essence of Boomerness: they tried to liberate us, and instead of freedom they left behind chaos.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published January 12, 2021
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February 3, 2021
What is a “baby boomer”? Technically, it is an American born between 1945 and 1964. More communicatively, a boomer is a member of the worst generation in American history, and perhaps the worst generation in human history. The boomers, handed a wonderful, successful, stable society, fed it into a woodchipper, starting the very instant they could have any influence on society. They cobbled together the brakeless clown car in which we now all must ride, and dumped the rest of us into it, after picking our pockets and stripping every shred of our dignity. And now the author of this excellent book, Helen Andrews, who is not a boomer, expertly analyzes this decline and ongoing fall, through profiles of six boomers, each an exemplar (but not exemplary).
I’m not a boomer either; I’m Generation X (1965–1980), from the middle of it. We’ve always been oppressed by the boomers, who ate the seed corn that should have fueled our generation’s success. But at least we came of age before the boomers truly ruined everything for the Millennials and later generations. That meant that at least some of us, especially those in the professional-managerial elite, were able to navigate the crumbling of our society to some degree of success and stability. The destruction wrought by the boomers, however, has now made it much harder for those who came later, Millennials and Generation Z, and nearly impossible for those not part of the upper tier of the two-tier, extractive, stupid society the boomers built.
Despite not offering optimism, Boomers is a joy to read. Andrews’s writing is sparkling. She self-identifies as mean, though her touch is actually mostly fairly gentle; I would excoriate the boomers without mercy, but she is willing to give some of them the benefit of the doubt. So this book is not a polemic; if anything Andrews errs on the side of a mild lashing, rather than a vigorous flogging. Her book attempts to understand, and to show, how certain of the boomers, representative of their generation, “had all the elements of greatness but [their] effect on the world was tragically and often ironically contrary to their intentions.” I suppose that’s one way to put it.
The inspiration for Boomers was, Andrews tells us, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, which, in the anger that followed the Great War, tore down those who had actually contributed to making an outstanding society. The two books really prove opposites, however: Strachey lied that the Victorians were a corrupt and incompetent ruling class; Andrews demonstrates that is precisely what the boomers are. But she explicitly wants, as Strachey reduced the influence of the Victorians on his world, to reduce the influence of the boomers on our world. Whether and how that can be done we will see later. And while Strachey is the author’s putative model, I think Boomers has more in common with Czesław Milosz’s The Captive Mind, which studied the accommodations, or not, made with Communism by four exemplars chosen by Milosz. Unlike Strachey, but like Milosz, Andrews accurately gives credit where credit is due, without holding fire when that’s called for.
What did the boomers destroy? Andrews makes no attempt to itemize all their harms; this is a short book, and those facts have been often covered by others, though certainly elements crop up in the six profiles. In short, the boomers destroyed the fabric of society. They demanded rights, and rejected responsibilities. They destroyed families, and thereby the fulfillment of both men and women (Andrews attacks, in passing, Betty Friedan and her odious and lying screed, The Feminine Mystique). They destroyed education, substituting cant and leftist ideology for rigor and the transmission of American ideals. They crushed the working class, both through their extractive economics, such as globalization, and by smashing all intermediary institutions, while they exalted the federal government and the priesthood of the administrative state, thereby neutering the working class as a political force and mutating beyond recognition the political structure of the Republic. They destroyed high culture in everything from architecture to music to film. And much more—but, in short, they ruined everything that makes a society strong, capable, and enjoyable for all its members, rather than benefits only an elite, extractive few. There can be no doubt of any of this, which all began in the 1960s, at the very moment the boomers were able to begin hijacking the existing system, with the help of dissatisfied members of former generations who at that time occupied positions of power, but who were soon enough shown the door as insufficiently dedicated to remaking America.
Andrews picks her six exemplar boomers to represent six fields—technology, entertainment, economics, academia, politics, and law. She shows how each left an area of American life worse off than it was given to him. One might view them as personifications of six deadly sins, each of whom had a different axis of destruction. Steve Jobs eroded moral virtue, though unlike the others his sins were not intended. Aaron Sorkin, propagandist of our screens, poured poison into the porches of our ears. Jeffrey Sachs, economic imperialist and destroyer of cultural fabrics. Camille Paglia, corrupter of our youth. Al Sharpton, racial grifter. Sonia Sotomayor, racial grievance hustler. These sins are all projects of the Left, of course, but Andrews does not view her subjects, for the most part, through a political lens, but rather through a sociological lens. Regardless, collectively, these types created the putrefying blob that is 2021 America.
First on the chopping block is Steve Jobs. At first, I wasn’t sure why Andrews included, and started with, Jobs. But her choice is clever, because she shows an exception can prove the rule, most of all by contrasting Jobs with his worthless successor as head of Apple, Tim Cook. Not that Jobs didn’t exemplify plenty of boomer personality traits, notably grossly excessive self-focus. But her considered conclusion is that “Jobs’s greatest rebellion was against his own generation,” and I think that’s true. “The big difference between Jobs and his fellow boomers comes down to this: they were institution destroyers, and he was an institution builder.”
Now, to be fair, I have a personal soft spot for Jobs. Although he was a hugely defective person, he is one of the few business geniuses I recognize. As a successful entrepreneur myself, and a corporate lawyer before that, I have long recognized that almost all high-profile businessmen are in fact nothing special at all. The prototypical example is Jack Welch, but you can pick any modern CEO at random, and realize that any modestly intelligent and competent person could perform the same job just as well or better. Sure, Jobs was often flaky, and frequently acted like an overgrown child, but those are personal defects, not judgments on his achievements. What I also liked about Jobs was his refusal to get sucked into donating money to causes, particularly left-wing causes. As he said of Bill Gates, “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy.”
Still, Jobs enabled the vices peddled by the boomers to reach all of us, through the technology he thought would benefit us. Andrews faults Jobs because his creations created a world “that gives free rein to the boomers’ worse vices,” most of all those that destroyed the working classes to benefit the boomers. Jobs effectuated, as Andrews says, “limbic capitalism,” “the redirection of America’s productive energies into inducing and servicing addictions.” Pornography, job instability, drug addiction, gig work, and the fake achievement of video games are the new normal, which seems normal to us, even though any time traveler from the past would immediately see this as the foolery of an society at its end. But creating this wasn’t Jobs’s goal; he simply had an overly optimistic view of human nature—and nobody foresaw that the internet, and the technology that relies on and revolves around it, would be, on balance, very much a net negative for society.
This comes into clearest focus when Andrews discusses the boomer who now runs Apple, Cook. He has none of Jobs’s vision; he’s a nasty little bean-counter who sucks up to China while oppressing decent Americans who aren’t coastal elites. Jobs was “a family-obsessed psychological basket case haunted by themes of inheritance and lineage.” But that’s much preferable to Cook, a deracinated, childless homosexual. (As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out about John Maynard Keynes, though Andrews shrinks a bit from endorsing it, homosexuals can have little or no investment in the future.) Cook’s primary goal, other than lining his pockets, is being a “global citizen,” an impossible entity, yet the logical end point of boomer navel-gazing and self-love. Cook has taken what Jobs created and used it to corrode America in ways unimaginable to the Jobs of 1986.
Next up is Aaron Sorkin, entertainer. I must admit I know nothing at all about Sorkin. I have never watched a single episode of The West Wing, the show for which Sorkin is famous. My impression has long been that show was simply a standard piece of left-wing agitprop. Andrews seems to disagree, yet all the specific examples she gives about the show merely strongly confirm my impression. Television was, we know, the boomers’ main vehicle for distributing poison to destroy the strong culture that America had in 1960, a project that continues today. Certainly, most television, especially television news, is unwatchable for anyone with any intelligence—when it is not overt lies, which is most of the time, it is cultural propaganda directed at Left ends. Even the few decent shows, such as The Expanse, are filled with propaganda. Andrews paints Sorkin as a type of ingénue, unable to grasp how most Americans, especially conservative ones, think, yet trying to understand. I think that’s false. I think Sorkin is a prototypical boomer propagandist, one of many active agents of American destruction, all of whom should be beaten with chains and sentenced to perpetual silence for their sins.
But we can all get behind Andrews’s next target, Jeffrey Sachs. Again, I’ve never paid much attention to Sachs, even though he floated around the edges of my own life tied to Eastern Europe and as a young corporate drone in the 1990s. As Andrews deftly outlines, he made an entire career out of destroying other societies through his economic advice as a “development economist.” He started with Poland, wrecking it and handing decades-long ascendance to the former Communists who looted the country (whose power was only recently put down by the awesome Law and Justice Party), and then “he did what every great man does when he is overwhelmed by hubris. He decided to go to Russia.” There he became tangled in, and indirectly participated in, the web of corruption that nearly destroyed that country. Hitting the eject button, he next went to Africa, and ruined countries there, through involvement in the United Nations’s Millennium Villages program. Sachs was earlier ably pilloried by William Easterly, whom Andrews discusses—although she doesn’t endorse Easterly either, with his overly Hayekian, libertarian approach. Ironically in a way, given Strachey as her model, she endorses the Victorians, the colonialists. After all, with maybe some very rare exceptions, the colonized were never better off than under colonialism—something that I am certain will get even more true as the world spins apart over the next decade or two, returning those sections of the world now totally dependent on Western handouts to the barbarism from which they came.
Camille Paglia is chosen to represent academia. I can’t decide if this is an inspired or cramped choice, given that of all the six areas Andrews examines, academia is today the closest to a singularity of cretinhood, with tens of thousands of possible choices for sinners, many more academically mainstream. Andrews’s criticisms of Paglia are less related to the academy, although Paglia’s superficiality and repetition do characterize the academy, and more related to her greatly contributing, under the guise of iconoclasm against the Left, to the destruction of culture. This included the mainstreaming of pornography, which has turned out, along with the culture of contraception, to be a disaster of the first order. The boomers caused this; they normalized obscenity and made it impossible to prohibit, through their control of the courts. Andrews ties this degradation to the degrading of culture more generally; there was high culture and folk culture; now there is only pop culture, and Paglia was instrumental, or at least highly visible, in this process as well. I think it began long before Paglia, though. But it doesn’t really matter; we can all agree that American culture today, if one can even use the term, is a sink of turpitude.
Al Sharpton exemplifies the boomer belief in transformational, rather than transactional, politics. He combines this with being a greasy, lying shakedown artist. Andrews seems to have a grudging respect for Sharpton; I suppose the same kind of respect one has for a slick con man you see performing a con on someone else. Of course, as Andrews does somewhat more than hint at, Sharpton and all the other supposed black leaders among the boomers have actually made the average black American worse off. Far worse off. Yes, a thin crust of black people have made it to the professional-managerial elite, in part due to opportunities formerly closed now being open, in part due to various forms of extortion, either using threats or appeals to the supposed need for remedies for past wrongs to obtain handouts. Most black people today in America, though, are far worse off, relatively speaking in economic terms, and, as far as family and social structure go, absolutely speaking, than they were in 1960.
Andrews pulls few punches here, nor should she . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
I’m not a boomer either; I’m Generation X (1965–1980), from the middle of it. We’ve always been oppressed by the boomers, who ate the seed corn that should have fueled our generation’s success. But at least we came of age before the boomers truly ruined everything for the Millennials and later generations. That meant that at least some of us, especially those in the professional-managerial elite, were able to navigate the crumbling of our society to some degree of success and stability. The destruction wrought by the boomers, however, has now made it much harder for those who came later, Millennials and Generation Z, and nearly impossible for those not part of the upper tier of the two-tier, extractive, stupid society the boomers built.
Despite not offering optimism, Boomers is a joy to read. Andrews’s writing is sparkling. She self-identifies as mean, though her touch is actually mostly fairly gentle; I would excoriate the boomers without mercy, but she is willing to give some of them the benefit of the doubt. So this book is not a polemic; if anything Andrews errs on the side of a mild lashing, rather than a vigorous flogging. Her book attempts to understand, and to show, how certain of the boomers, representative of their generation, “had all the elements of greatness but [their] effect on the world was tragically and often ironically contrary to their intentions.” I suppose that’s one way to put it.
The inspiration for Boomers was, Andrews tells us, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, which, in the anger that followed the Great War, tore down those who had actually contributed to making an outstanding society. The two books really prove opposites, however: Strachey lied that the Victorians were a corrupt and incompetent ruling class; Andrews demonstrates that is precisely what the boomers are. But she explicitly wants, as Strachey reduced the influence of the Victorians on his world, to reduce the influence of the boomers on our world. Whether and how that can be done we will see later. And while Strachey is the author’s putative model, I think Boomers has more in common with Czesław Milosz’s The Captive Mind, which studied the accommodations, or not, made with Communism by four exemplars chosen by Milosz. Unlike Strachey, but like Milosz, Andrews accurately gives credit where credit is due, without holding fire when that’s called for.
What did the boomers destroy? Andrews makes no attempt to itemize all their harms; this is a short book, and those facts have been often covered by others, though certainly elements crop up in the six profiles. In short, the boomers destroyed the fabric of society. They demanded rights, and rejected responsibilities. They destroyed families, and thereby the fulfillment of both men and women (Andrews attacks, in passing, Betty Friedan and her odious and lying screed, The Feminine Mystique). They destroyed education, substituting cant and leftist ideology for rigor and the transmission of American ideals. They crushed the working class, both through their extractive economics, such as globalization, and by smashing all intermediary institutions, while they exalted the federal government and the priesthood of the administrative state, thereby neutering the working class as a political force and mutating beyond recognition the political structure of the Republic. They destroyed high culture in everything from architecture to music to film. And much more—but, in short, they ruined everything that makes a society strong, capable, and enjoyable for all its members, rather than benefits only an elite, extractive few. There can be no doubt of any of this, which all began in the 1960s, at the very moment the boomers were able to begin hijacking the existing system, with the help of dissatisfied members of former generations who at that time occupied positions of power, but who were soon enough shown the door as insufficiently dedicated to remaking America.
Andrews picks her six exemplar boomers to represent six fields—technology, entertainment, economics, academia, politics, and law. She shows how each left an area of American life worse off than it was given to him. One might view them as personifications of six deadly sins, each of whom had a different axis of destruction. Steve Jobs eroded moral virtue, though unlike the others his sins were not intended. Aaron Sorkin, propagandist of our screens, poured poison into the porches of our ears. Jeffrey Sachs, economic imperialist and destroyer of cultural fabrics. Camille Paglia, corrupter of our youth. Al Sharpton, racial grifter. Sonia Sotomayor, racial grievance hustler. These sins are all projects of the Left, of course, but Andrews does not view her subjects, for the most part, through a political lens, but rather through a sociological lens. Regardless, collectively, these types created the putrefying blob that is 2021 America.
First on the chopping block is Steve Jobs. At first, I wasn’t sure why Andrews included, and started with, Jobs. But her choice is clever, because she shows an exception can prove the rule, most of all by contrasting Jobs with his worthless successor as head of Apple, Tim Cook. Not that Jobs didn’t exemplify plenty of boomer personality traits, notably grossly excessive self-focus. But her considered conclusion is that “Jobs’s greatest rebellion was against his own generation,” and I think that’s true. “The big difference between Jobs and his fellow boomers comes down to this: they were institution destroyers, and he was an institution builder.”
Now, to be fair, I have a personal soft spot for Jobs. Although he was a hugely defective person, he is one of the few business geniuses I recognize. As a successful entrepreneur myself, and a corporate lawyer before that, I have long recognized that almost all high-profile businessmen are in fact nothing special at all. The prototypical example is Jack Welch, but you can pick any modern CEO at random, and realize that any modestly intelligent and competent person could perform the same job just as well or better. Sure, Jobs was often flaky, and frequently acted like an overgrown child, but those are personal defects, not judgments on his achievements. What I also liked about Jobs was his refusal to get sucked into donating money to causes, particularly left-wing causes. As he said of Bill Gates, “Bill is basically unimaginative and has never invented anything, which is why I think he’s more comfortable now in philanthropy.”
Still, Jobs enabled the vices peddled by the boomers to reach all of us, through the technology he thought would benefit us. Andrews faults Jobs because his creations created a world “that gives free rein to the boomers’ worse vices,” most of all those that destroyed the working classes to benefit the boomers. Jobs effectuated, as Andrews says, “limbic capitalism,” “the redirection of America’s productive energies into inducing and servicing addictions.” Pornography, job instability, drug addiction, gig work, and the fake achievement of video games are the new normal, which seems normal to us, even though any time traveler from the past would immediately see this as the foolery of an society at its end. But creating this wasn’t Jobs’s goal; he simply had an overly optimistic view of human nature—and nobody foresaw that the internet, and the technology that relies on and revolves around it, would be, on balance, very much a net negative for society.
This comes into clearest focus when Andrews discusses the boomer who now runs Apple, Cook. He has none of Jobs’s vision; he’s a nasty little bean-counter who sucks up to China while oppressing decent Americans who aren’t coastal elites. Jobs was “a family-obsessed psychological basket case haunted by themes of inheritance and lineage.” But that’s much preferable to Cook, a deracinated, childless homosexual. (As Joseph Schumpeter pointed out about John Maynard Keynes, though Andrews shrinks a bit from endorsing it, homosexuals can have little or no investment in the future.) Cook’s primary goal, other than lining his pockets, is being a “global citizen,” an impossible entity, yet the logical end point of boomer navel-gazing and self-love. Cook has taken what Jobs created and used it to corrode America in ways unimaginable to the Jobs of 1986.
Next up is Aaron Sorkin, entertainer. I must admit I know nothing at all about Sorkin. I have never watched a single episode of The West Wing, the show for which Sorkin is famous. My impression has long been that show was simply a standard piece of left-wing agitprop. Andrews seems to disagree, yet all the specific examples she gives about the show merely strongly confirm my impression. Television was, we know, the boomers’ main vehicle for distributing poison to destroy the strong culture that America had in 1960, a project that continues today. Certainly, most television, especially television news, is unwatchable for anyone with any intelligence—when it is not overt lies, which is most of the time, it is cultural propaganda directed at Left ends. Even the few decent shows, such as The Expanse, are filled with propaganda. Andrews paints Sorkin as a type of ingénue, unable to grasp how most Americans, especially conservative ones, think, yet trying to understand. I think that’s false. I think Sorkin is a prototypical boomer propagandist, one of many active agents of American destruction, all of whom should be beaten with chains and sentenced to perpetual silence for their sins.
But we can all get behind Andrews’s next target, Jeffrey Sachs. Again, I’ve never paid much attention to Sachs, even though he floated around the edges of my own life tied to Eastern Europe and as a young corporate drone in the 1990s. As Andrews deftly outlines, he made an entire career out of destroying other societies through his economic advice as a “development economist.” He started with Poland, wrecking it and handing decades-long ascendance to the former Communists who looted the country (whose power was only recently put down by the awesome Law and Justice Party), and then “he did what every great man does when he is overwhelmed by hubris. He decided to go to Russia.” There he became tangled in, and indirectly participated in, the web of corruption that nearly destroyed that country. Hitting the eject button, he next went to Africa, and ruined countries there, through involvement in the United Nations’s Millennium Villages program. Sachs was earlier ably pilloried by William Easterly, whom Andrews discusses—although she doesn’t endorse Easterly either, with his overly Hayekian, libertarian approach. Ironically in a way, given Strachey as her model, she endorses the Victorians, the colonialists. After all, with maybe some very rare exceptions, the colonized were never better off than under colonialism—something that I am certain will get even more true as the world spins apart over the next decade or two, returning those sections of the world now totally dependent on Western handouts to the barbarism from which they came.
Camille Paglia is chosen to represent academia. I can’t decide if this is an inspired or cramped choice, given that of all the six areas Andrews examines, academia is today the closest to a singularity of cretinhood, with tens of thousands of possible choices for sinners, many more academically mainstream. Andrews’s criticisms of Paglia are less related to the academy, although Paglia’s superficiality and repetition do characterize the academy, and more related to her greatly contributing, under the guise of iconoclasm against the Left, to the destruction of culture. This included the mainstreaming of pornography, which has turned out, along with the culture of contraception, to be a disaster of the first order. The boomers caused this; they normalized obscenity and made it impossible to prohibit, through their control of the courts. Andrews ties this degradation to the degrading of culture more generally; there was high culture and folk culture; now there is only pop culture, and Paglia was instrumental, or at least highly visible, in this process as well. I think it began long before Paglia, though. But it doesn’t really matter; we can all agree that American culture today, if one can even use the term, is a sink of turpitude.
Al Sharpton exemplifies the boomer belief in transformational, rather than transactional, politics. He combines this with being a greasy, lying shakedown artist. Andrews seems to have a grudging respect for Sharpton; I suppose the same kind of respect one has for a slick con man you see performing a con on someone else. Of course, as Andrews does somewhat more than hint at, Sharpton and all the other supposed black leaders among the boomers have actually made the average black American worse off. Far worse off. Yes, a thin crust of black people have made it to the professional-managerial elite, in part due to opportunities formerly closed now being open, in part due to various forms of extortion, either using threats or appeals to the supposed need for remedies for past wrongs to obtain handouts. Most black people today in America, though, are far worse off, relatively speaking in economic terms, and, as far as family and social structure go, absolutely speaking, than they were in 1960.
Andrews pulls few punches here, nor should she . . . [Review completes as first comment.]
March 30, 2021
I was so excited for this one. I had heard Andrews talk elsewhere and I could tell she was smart, educated, widely-read, and well-spoken. I thought she would make witty observations about generational gaps, trends, and differences.
The problem is, this book has nothing to do with Boomers. Andrews doesn't tie it all together. Each chapter is a little mini biography, one each for: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. All she does is give descriptions of each person's actions, words, and beliefs.
Pulling in particular examples can work fine, but not if there are no connections. Not if you don't actually apply those examples to your thesis. Andrews barely spends any time showing how each person is, supposedly, representational of the wider Boomer generation—How each person's personal life decisions are reflective of decisions that Boomers make. I was constantly asking myself, "What does this have to do with Boomers?"
The first and last chapters that bookend the text are actually about different generations. Those are the most interesting pieces. But it barely scratches the surface. She talks about Boomers at the front, and Millennials at the end, and, oddly, Andrews seems to completely ignore Gen Xers.
The problem is, this book has nothing to do with Boomers. Andrews doesn't tie it all together. Each chapter is a little mini biography, one each for: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. All she does is give descriptions of each person's actions, words, and beliefs.
Pulling in particular examples can work fine, but not if there are no connections. Not if you don't actually apply those examples to your thesis. Andrews barely spends any time showing how each person is, supposedly, representational of the wider Boomer generation—How each person's personal life decisions are reflective of decisions that Boomers make. I was constantly asking myself, "What does this have to do with Boomers?"
The first and last chapters that bookend the text are actually about different generations. Those are the most interesting pieces. But it barely scratches the surface. She talks about Boomers at the front, and Millennials at the end, and, oddly, Andrews seems to completely ignore Gen Xers.
Read
January 21, 2021This book was well-timed to capitalize on the "OK Boomer" meme that briefly swept the world in 2020. Rather than a straightforward curmudgeonly analysis of the values of the Baby Boomers, the book is actually structured as a set of short biographies of a number of people from that generation. The criticisms are mostly to be read between the lines. This is fine in itself and is probably even an appealing mode of storytelling. But for someone of the millennial generation (like the author) I was hoping for more unpacking of a few of the blasphemous thoughts raised here, such as the idea that television is in fact as bad as Neil Postman had warned. Andrews ends on an important point that millennials have recreated many of the same deep assumptions about the world held by the Baby Boomers they rail against. If anything they are even intensifying them. Only a few segments of American society (Catholics are raised as an example) are inclined to view history as something valuable and worth defending, despite the fact that it began before 1960. This point about historical iconoclasm is important and the eradication of high and folk cultures that the Baby Boomers presided over has not been salutary on all counts.
February 9, 2021
Well, let this be a lesson to me about checking stuff out blind on Libby. This is pretty bad and I would have at least been prepared for it if I’d read up on Andrews’ bio ahead of time. At best, some of these profiles have a “the boomers are a land of contrasts” pointlessness to them. Many of them are less profiles or a generational observation, and more of an excuse for Andrews to wander off on tangents about vaguely liberal ideas or elite institutions she doesn’t care for. For example, the idea of doing a critical profile of someone like Al Sharpton is fair enough, but she uses it as a jumping off point for an ode to machine politics and criticism of desegregation implementation (some of which does become straight-up racist apologist nonsense).
My favorite instance of the books consistent “good point followed by a bonkers takeaway” pattern is when Andrews argues that programs to increase community college enrollment may end up doing more to entrench over-credentialing of the workforce than raising education or intellectual levels (interesting, tell me more). She follows this with an assertion that the true problem is that boomers abandoned church as a no-cost place to ponder the big questions (?!?!).
In short, this is a bad book you shouldn’t read, but I will finish it out of morbid curiosity since she seems to get worse and, as noted above, more racist as she goes.
My favorite instance of the books consistent “good point followed by a bonkers takeaway” pattern is when Andrews argues that programs to increase community college enrollment may end up doing more to entrench over-credentialing of the workforce than raising education or intellectual levels (interesting, tell me more). She follows this with an assertion that the true problem is that boomers abandoned church as a no-cost place to ponder the big questions (?!?!).
In short, this is a bad book you shouldn’t read, but I will finish it out of morbid curiosity since she seems to get worse and, as noted above, more racist as she goes.
April 6, 2021
What a truly awful book this is. I am dumber for having read it. Approaching the Boomers-are-the-worst argument from the right was intriguing to me in an enemy-of-my-enemy kind of way, but all I could discern from the first third was a shoehorning of biographical facts into the same old tired talking points and then shoehorning that resulting mess into an updated version of Eminent Victorians.
The author congratulates herself multiple times, starting in the introduction, for being aware of Eminent Victorians. This confirms the theory (forget whose) that every American has read exactly one book.
I was torn between soldiering on and putting the book down almost from the start. I finally decided on the latter shortly after she wrote. that Oscar Wilde agrees with her that he got everything he deserved.
Avoid this mess. Not recommended.
The author congratulates herself multiple times, starting in the introduction, for being aware of Eminent Victorians. This confirms the theory (forget whose) that every American has read exactly one book.
I was torn between soldiering on and putting the book down almost from the start. I finally decided on the latter shortly after she wrote. that Oscar Wilde agrees with her that he got everything he deserved.
Avoid this mess. Not recommended.
January 24, 2021
Having seen excerpts of this book being passed around on Twitter it lulled me in thinking it would be a lot deeper than it actually is and thus worth starting the year with. The title might trick you into believing that this is a neutral doorstopper chronicling the legacy of America's most greedy and narcissistic generation in detail. It is not; it's a piece of American far-right propaganda that might as well replace the BOOMERS in the title with LIBERALS, considering that the author rails against everyone and everything related to Democrats and nothing else. Ironically, at one point in the book she quotes a commie saying something about how religion is like a nail, and goes in deeper the more you mess with it. Maybe Andrews should listen to herself and try to be unbiased in her work and look at both sides equally, instead of whipping the liberals relentlessly until she causes the reader to feel for them as underdogs.
Still, being propaganda does not necessarily discredit anything. Plenty of pamphlets still swell hearts today. But it's also the unfortunate case that this book offers nothing when judged on its merits as propaganda either. No attempt is made to appear transparent or persuade a person that might have a differing view. Maybe a few lefties would be tricked into picking this up thinking it's something else, but they will see right through it within a couple of pages. It's really just self-indulgent dreck written by a person that's trying to take advantage of readers that share her worldview and sell product. Again, ironically, since so much of this book is intended to discredit pop culture, yet this is more superficial than your average pop-science/history release. Way, way worse.
Most of all, though, this just feels lazy and rushed. For example, I am not American nor passionate in the slightest about Steve Jobs and his products, yet I found myself familiar with most of the things she mentions. When the section came to a close, I was actually wondering what the hell it was that I read. When I purchase a book it's done in the hopes that it's going to be a little more insightful than, say, a podcast about the topic. But the level of information is exactly what you'd expect to get from an author as he presents a summary of his book during a podcast, with the hopes that you will buy it to get a full, detailed picture. On the other hand, it also makes so many references to past events that if you are, say, a teen reading this without any knowledge of American politics and world history, then it would be impenetrable. If this book is meant for a learned audience, then you should put the required effort and give them something fresh. If it's not that, if this is just an entry-level work on the level of a quick video essay, then maybe take a moment to explain who people like Abbie Hoffman are or cut them out entirely. This is the worst of both worlds: not much to gain if you're an informed reader, and deeply confusing if you're totally ignorant.
Another thing about this book that I hate is that it does a lot of begging the question. The author is a complete pussy that never delivers the point she's moving towards in a dignified way. She has an entire chapter on Al Sharpton which is basically an extreme demonization of Blacks in America, so bad that I'd say it enters the realm of parody. But at no point does she tell you that what she's for is returning to segregation, or perhaps doing away with the Black population entirely. Like a coward, she'll just cherrypick whatever sways most highly emotive readers and leaves it to them to draw the conclusion.
But what should help you make up your mind about whether or not you want to read this is the level of stupidity displayed by the author herself on another occasion. Just in the first few minutes of a podcast I was listening to out of curiosity to see what she sounds and looks like (Realignment, episode 88), Andrew stated falsehoods of such magnitude that even an enthusiast of ancient history would bristle, let alone a trained historian.
Andrews states: "Looking at different civilizations throughout history, there have been others that liberated women just as much as we do today. Where women were held in the same esteem as men in public affairs, [they] were allowed to hold jobs - they were very equal in the senses we think of as important today. But the anthropological fact is that societies that make women equal in that way tend to also, at the same time, devalue the family. In other words, the more equal women are, in terms of competing with men, the less your society cares about motherhood, and, you know, children belonging to their parents, they just kind of denigrate the family. Sparta is the classic example. You know, they had women warriors in Sparta, and nobody gave a damn whose kid anybody was because they didn't care about the family."
I get that to a person that knows no history, this might seem like nothing. But when you do know history, hearing a person speak so authoritatively about an issue they clearly know nothing about should give you cause for concern. It's like having a guy trying to sell you energy drinks starting out by saying water is bad for you.
First of all, there were no societies that liberated women as they are today. None. But more hilarious than that is that she says SPARTA is the classic example of female warriors and devaluing the family. Classic, huh? That's funny.
It's certainly true that Spartans gave more freedom to women than Athenians. And it's also true that unlike Athenians, Spartans made a point of offering physical education to their women as well. However, these women were not "warriors" nor were they expected to fight in on the battlefield or participate in affairs of state. The women were just expected to be competent enough to stay at home with the elders and children and do what needs doing in the case of emergency. And since they ruled over helots (slaves), they were essentially minor overseers on these estates. There were no female hoplites. Women were never a part of the gerousia (the council of elders advising the kings), nor did queens hold any authority in ruling.
The second part about them not valuing family is also laughable, since it's perhaps the only thing they did value. Babies that showed signs of weakness were indeed disposed of - that isn't just a myth - since the more strong boys you added to the society, the more respect you were granted as a male. Some historians believe that the obsession with eugenics and perfecting the Spartan "race" is what dwindled their numbers and led to their eventual demise from the center stage of ancient politics. It's very hard to imagine how a society that in fact put almost all of its emphasis in the family and child-rearing has anything resembling Andrews' schizophrenia about them, let alone being any "classic example."
In short, Andrews has no clue what she's saying. ZERO. And if she can speak so authoritatively on a topic she clearly knows nothing about, why would you trust anything that comes out of this woman's mouth? So you can double-check each time and see how she's either misrepresenting the facts or outright lying about them?
I did get one surprise at the end of the book, which was seeing Curtis Yarvin namedropped (who actually goes by "Moldbug" so the omission of his persona is very much intentional), a cringelord extraordinaire who is known for writing blogs where he only manages to express himself by appealing to Star War, time and time again. A guy deeply devoted to Israel and explicit use of force against citizenry, who thinks it would be "easier" if Palestinians were just genocided so life can just carry on already. And he would do it while justifying it with Sith philosophy or some stupid shit. The kind of deranged loser living out his perversions in a fantasy headspace that gives all zionists a bad name. And this is the man Andrews gives thanks to.
But I gotta say, there's something hilarious about writing a book where you shit on pop culture when you're palling around with and giving thanks to a manchild that never advanced past children's movies. Oddly characteristic of the American Right - pretend to care about literature while you really only obsess over Star Wars and superhero crap.
Are Democrats bad? Of course, they're soulless husks- so are Republicans. Buy this book if what you want to spend time on is reading some ugly trollop's glorified blog posts. If not, there are more informative pundits on YouTube, and you can watch those for free.
Still, being propaganda does not necessarily discredit anything. Plenty of pamphlets still swell hearts today. But it's also the unfortunate case that this book offers nothing when judged on its merits as propaganda either. No attempt is made to appear transparent or persuade a person that might have a differing view. Maybe a few lefties would be tricked into picking this up thinking it's something else, but they will see right through it within a couple of pages. It's really just self-indulgent dreck written by a person that's trying to take advantage of readers that share her worldview and sell product. Again, ironically, since so much of this book is intended to discredit pop culture, yet this is more superficial than your average pop-science/history release. Way, way worse.
Most of all, though, this just feels lazy and rushed. For example, I am not American nor passionate in the slightest about Steve Jobs and his products, yet I found myself familiar with most of the things she mentions. When the section came to a close, I was actually wondering what the hell it was that I read. When I purchase a book it's done in the hopes that it's going to be a little more insightful than, say, a podcast about the topic. But the level of information is exactly what you'd expect to get from an author as he presents a summary of his book during a podcast, with the hopes that you will buy it to get a full, detailed picture. On the other hand, it also makes so many references to past events that if you are, say, a teen reading this without any knowledge of American politics and world history, then it would be impenetrable. If this book is meant for a learned audience, then you should put the required effort and give them something fresh. If it's not that, if this is just an entry-level work on the level of a quick video essay, then maybe take a moment to explain who people like Abbie Hoffman are or cut them out entirely. This is the worst of both worlds: not much to gain if you're an informed reader, and deeply confusing if you're totally ignorant.
Another thing about this book that I hate is that it does a lot of begging the question. The author is a complete pussy that never delivers the point she's moving towards in a dignified way. She has an entire chapter on Al Sharpton which is basically an extreme demonization of Blacks in America, so bad that I'd say it enters the realm of parody. But at no point does she tell you that what she's for is returning to segregation, or perhaps doing away with the Black population entirely. Like a coward, she'll just cherrypick whatever sways most highly emotive readers and leaves it to them to draw the conclusion.
But what should help you make up your mind about whether or not you want to read this is the level of stupidity displayed by the author herself on another occasion. Just in the first few minutes of a podcast I was listening to out of curiosity to see what she sounds and looks like (Realignment, episode 88), Andrew stated falsehoods of such magnitude that even an enthusiast of ancient history would bristle, let alone a trained historian.
Andrews states: "Looking at different civilizations throughout history, there have been others that liberated women just as much as we do today. Where women were held in the same esteem as men in public affairs, [they] were allowed to hold jobs - they were very equal in the senses we think of as important today. But the anthropological fact is that societies that make women equal in that way tend to also, at the same time, devalue the family. In other words, the more equal women are, in terms of competing with men, the less your society cares about motherhood, and, you know, children belonging to their parents, they just kind of denigrate the family. Sparta is the classic example. You know, they had women warriors in Sparta, and nobody gave a damn whose kid anybody was because they didn't care about the family."
I get that to a person that knows no history, this might seem like nothing. But when you do know history, hearing a person speak so authoritatively about an issue they clearly know nothing about should give you cause for concern. It's like having a guy trying to sell you energy drinks starting out by saying water is bad for you.
First of all, there were no societies that liberated women as they are today. None. But more hilarious than that is that she says SPARTA is the classic example of female warriors and devaluing the family. Classic, huh? That's funny.
It's certainly true that Spartans gave more freedom to women than Athenians. And it's also true that unlike Athenians, Spartans made a point of offering physical education to their women as well. However, these women were not "warriors" nor were they expected to fight in on the battlefield or participate in affairs of state. The women were just expected to be competent enough to stay at home with the elders and children and do what needs doing in the case of emergency. And since they ruled over helots (slaves), they were essentially minor overseers on these estates. There were no female hoplites. Women were never a part of the gerousia (the council of elders advising the kings), nor did queens hold any authority in ruling.
The second part about them not valuing family is also laughable, since it's perhaps the only thing they did value. Babies that showed signs of weakness were indeed disposed of - that isn't just a myth - since the more strong boys you added to the society, the more respect you were granted as a male. Some historians believe that the obsession with eugenics and perfecting the Spartan "race" is what dwindled their numbers and led to their eventual demise from the center stage of ancient politics. It's very hard to imagine how a society that in fact put almost all of its emphasis in the family and child-rearing has anything resembling Andrews' schizophrenia about them, let alone being any "classic example."
In short, Andrews has no clue what she's saying. ZERO. And if she can speak so authoritatively on a topic she clearly knows nothing about, why would you trust anything that comes out of this woman's mouth? So you can double-check each time and see how she's either misrepresenting the facts or outright lying about them?
I did get one surprise at the end of the book, which was seeing Curtis Yarvin namedropped (who actually goes by "Moldbug" so the omission of his persona is very much intentional), a cringelord extraordinaire who is known for writing blogs where he only manages to express himself by appealing to Star War, time and time again. A guy deeply devoted to Israel and explicit use of force against citizenry, who thinks it would be "easier" if Palestinians were just genocided so life can just carry on already. And he would do it while justifying it with Sith philosophy or some stupid shit. The kind of deranged loser living out his perversions in a fantasy headspace that gives all zionists a bad name. And this is the man Andrews gives thanks to.
But I gotta say, there's something hilarious about writing a book where you shit on pop culture when you're palling around with and giving thanks to a manchild that never advanced past children's movies. Oddly characteristic of the American Right - pretend to care about literature while you really only obsess over Star Wars and superhero crap.
Are Democrats bad? Of course, they're soulless husks- so are Republicans. Buy this book if what you want to spend time on is reading some ugly trollop's glorified blog posts. If not, there are more informative pundits on YouTube, and you can watch those for free.
January 6, 2024
An expose on perhaps the most selfish, narcissistic, amoral generation in history, this is a series of portraits of six well known Baby Boomers from technology, academia, entertainment, law, international development, and politics. The chapter of Jeffrey Sachs was a bit tedious and at times hard to follow, but otherwise Helen Andrews's depiction of her subjects was as vivid as it was compelling.
Andrews, herself a Millennial, writes beautifully and convincingly in her critique of a generation that has upended traditions and norms, mostly for its own sake, and has bequeathed upon its successors a legacy of a country left in tatters and teetering on the brink of destroying much of what makes it special and desirable in the first place.
For me, the most fascinating essays were about the two women profiled in the book: Camille Paglia and Sonia Sotomayor. The former is a radical liberal feminist lesbian who advocated pop culture and detracted from the classics, although she herself had been trained in the likes of Milton, Rosseau, and many others. Instead, Paglia became an ardent promoter of sex, pornography, prostitution, and sundry other associated shifts away from traditional notions of modesty and propriety. As a result, many universities now offer PhDs in pop culture and academics are increasingly unmoored from classical western knowledge and we are beginning to see the results in a highly fractured society hyperfocused on intersectionality and victimhood rather than reason. Paglia succeeded Susan Sontag as the preeminent female public intellectual. Paglia is complex figure, and has incurred wrath for insisting that women liberated by the sexual revolution are equals, not victims, in the sexual escapades that have increased over the years. The author argues that in being cancelled, she is suffering the consequences of her own making.
Sonia Sotomayor, of course, is Obama's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Helen Andrews describes her as a bully, which of course she is. Example after example bear out how Sotomayor uses the law to cower her opponents into submission, whether it be as an undergraduate insisting on more Latino faculty and staff, to Yale Law where she complained about recruiters who questioned the legitimacy of those promoted by affirmative action, to her years on courts in which her legal reasoning is often rooted in her identity as a "wise latina" whose race and gender supposedly bestow her with gifts of superiority over men or those from inferior races. As a result of this kind of reasoning among judges of her generation, activism has overtaken the judiciary and produced a growing backlash among the polity.
Through each essay, the author captures the zeitgeist of the Boomer generation -- unapologetically proud of the havoc wreaked upon society. Models of broken marriages and homes, selfish pursuits of individualism and greed, insistence upon right for ever increasingly fractious identity traits, Boomers have managed to destroy much of what America got right in history, and leave a society less stable, less prosperous, less cohesive, and less promising to the rising generations.
Helen Andrews is careful to give credit where it is due (e.g., Steven Jobs has transformed the world with his iPhone, although he largely rebelled against his own generation to do it, and Al Sharpton remains an effective transformational leader even if it is transactional leaders who are best equipped to effect change through nuts and bolts politicking in a diverse society). Nevertheless, I relished and savored this book for giving the Boomers their due for the harm they have left us without remorse. I look forward to reading more from Helen Andrews in the future.
Andrews, herself a Millennial, writes beautifully and convincingly in her critique of a generation that has upended traditions and norms, mostly for its own sake, and has bequeathed upon its successors a legacy of a country left in tatters and teetering on the brink of destroying much of what makes it special and desirable in the first place.
For me, the most fascinating essays were about the two women profiled in the book: Camille Paglia and Sonia Sotomayor. The former is a radical liberal feminist lesbian who advocated pop culture and detracted from the classics, although she herself had been trained in the likes of Milton, Rosseau, and many others. Instead, Paglia became an ardent promoter of sex, pornography, prostitution, and sundry other associated shifts away from traditional notions of modesty and propriety. As a result, many universities now offer PhDs in pop culture and academics are increasingly unmoored from classical western knowledge and we are beginning to see the results in a highly fractured society hyperfocused on intersectionality and victimhood rather than reason. Paglia succeeded Susan Sontag as the preeminent female public intellectual. Paglia is complex figure, and has incurred wrath for insisting that women liberated by the sexual revolution are equals, not victims, in the sexual escapades that have increased over the years. The author argues that in being cancelled, she is suffering the consequences of her own making.
Sonia Sotomayor, of course, is Obama's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court. Helen Andrews describes her as a bully, which of course she is. Example after example bear out how Sotomayor uses the law to cower her opponents into submission, whether it be as an undergraduate insisting on more Latino faculty and staff, to Yale Law where she complained about recruiters who questioned the legitimacy of those promoted by affirmative action, to her years on courts in which her legal reasoning is often rooted in her identity as a "wise latina" whose race and gender supposedly bestow her with gifts of superiority over men or those from inferior races. As a result of this kind of reasoning among judges of her generation, activism has overtaken the judiciary and produced a growing backlash among the polity.
Through each essay, the author captures the zeitgeist of the Boomer generation -- unapologetically proud of the havoc wreaked upon society. Models of broken marriages and homes, selfish pursuits of individualism and greed, insistence upon right for ever increasingly fractious identity traits, Boomers have managed to destroy much of what America got right in history, and leave a society less stable, less prosperous, less cohesive, and less promising to the rising generations.
Helen Andrews is careful to give credit where it is due (e.g., Steven Jobs has transformed the world with his iPhone, although he largely rebelled against his own generation to do it, and Al Sharpton remains an effective transformational leader even if it is transactional leaders who are best equipped to effect change through nuts and bolts politicking in a diverse society). Nevertheless, I relished and savored this book for giving the Boomers their due for the harm they have left us without remorse. I look forward to reading more from Helen Andrews in the future.
November 3, 2025
Boomers is organized like Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, which was a collection of short biographical sketches meant to simultaneously capture and criticize the ethos of the age. Strachey's book, despite being filled with aspersions, was a celebrated cult polemic, if you will, that culturally interred Victorians in the eyes of many. Andrews aspires to the same effect, perhaps even more lustily than Strachey. In fact, she acerbically asserts that "The boomers should not be allowed to shuffle off the world stage until they have been made to regret theirs [their degrading effect on their country]."
Thus, Andrews has selected six eminent boomers, individuals born between 1946 – 1964: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor who respectively hail from the fields of technology, entertainment, economics, academia, politics, and law. The portraits are not comprehensive and mostly serve as symbolic anchor for contained polemics about some social phenomenon she attaches to that anchor. These characterological anchors also present her with an opportunity for comparison. About half of the chapter figures have a major foil: Tim Cook for Jobs, Larry Summer for Sachs, Susan Sontag for Paglia, and Jesse Jackson for Sharpton (though Sontag and Jackson are Silent Generation Members). She flanks these free-wheeling sketches with an opening chapter on the boomers and a closing chapter on the Millennials, individuals born between 1981 - 1996. These flanking chapter really ground Andrew's perspective, which, over the sketches, sometimes vacillates from censure to sympathy to ambivalence.
As the subtitle indicates, Andrews has chosen to cast Boomers as an aspirational but ultimately destructive cohort. Their proclivity for wrecking inherited traditions of all kinds stems from an inability, for lack of a better locution, to grow up. They worship at the altar of youth and its trappings and haven't truly moved on. This compels all sorts of machinations and a grand hypocrisy as boomers have aged, especially because their reign has gone on so long due to their cohort size, and it has warped the American social sphere. Andrews trenchantly laments the destruction left by the boomers despite the prime position generations before placed them in:
Unfortunately, outside of the preface, Andrews doesn't develop this direct assault on boomers much further. Instead of producing direct evidence to support each of these claims, she relies on the sketches to illustrate the narrative. She does embed some relevant commentary in these profiles, but they are mostly asides, the major points of which land largely because they are juxtaposed against the folly of boomers or other obvious failures that happened to coincide with the boomer heyday. Even then, Andrews alleges that she chose the figures to profile not because they were "altogether a villain or a victim" but rather that they represent "some aspect of the boomer tragedy in all its complexity." This position incidentally shifts responsibility from a generational cohort to broader forces, which she references as "judicial activism, imperialism, the digital revolution." The residual ambivalence Andrews retains about the generation of her own parents (and mine) can blunt her polemical edge, making a precise ascertainment of her position on all topics presented sometimes ambiguous.
However, there are many wildly entertaining passages in the book (I have shared some excerpts some at Substack). Andrews is undeniably a talented and sharp wit. One would do well to avoid provoking her ire.
Despite some of the Andrews' often strong though sometimes unconventional conservatism, I hope left-of-center readers pick Boomers up. The "Ok, Boomer" insult did originate from a younger generation of left-wing activists after-all, and one of Andrews' contentions is that the boomers hollowed out any authentic form of left-wing class politics in America. However, her conservatism extends beyond a deference for private property, inherent patriotism, and traditional or familial social values. She has a stronger vision for the role of religion in public life. This emerges in her chapter on Sotomayor in which she traces how judicial activism, a kind she seems as inconsistent with the American Founding and almost all historical forms of civic organization, forever disrupted America's ability to transmitted religiosity across generations.
This is all I have to say for now, but I hope to return with a deeper look at each of the biographical sketches and the implicit argument Andrews is making in each. Stay tuned and in the meantime check this book out.
My extended commentary on Boomers is at Substack
Thus, Andrews has selected six eminent boomers, individuals born between 1946 – 1964: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor who respectively hail from the fields of technology, entertainment, economics, academia, politics, and law. The portraits are not comprehensive and mostly serve as symbolic anchor for contained polemics about some social phenomenon she attaches to that anchor. These characterological anchors also present her with an opportunity for comparison. About half of the chapter figures have a major foil: Tim Cook for Jobs, Larry Summer for Sachs, Susan Sontag for Paglia, and Jesse Jackson for Sharpton (though Sontag and Jackson are Silent Generation Members). She flanks these free-wheeling sketches with an opening chapter on the boomers and a closing chapter on the Millennials, individuals born between 1981 - 1996. These flanking chapter really ground Andrew's perspective, which, over the sketches, sometimes vacillates from censure to sympathy to ambivalence.
As the subtitle indicates, Andrews has chosen to cast Boomers as an aspirational but ultimately destructive cohort. Their proclivity for wrecking inherited traditions of all kinds stems from an inability, for lack of a better locution, to grow up. They worship at the altar of youth and its trappings and haven't truly moved on. This compels all sorts of machinations and a grand hypocrisy as boomers have aged, especially because their reign has gone on so long due to their cohort size, and it has warped the American social sphere. Andrews trenchantly laments the destruction left by the boomers despite the prime position generations before placed them in:
Every generation is dealt its own challenges and handles them as well as it can. The boomers were dealt an uncommonly good hand, which make it truly incredible that they should have screwed up so badly. They inherited prosperity, social cohesion, and functioning institutions. They passed on debt, inequality, moribund churches, and a broken democracy.
Unfortunately, outside of the preface, Andrews doesn't develop this direct assault on boomers much further. Instead of producing direct evidence to support each of these claims, she relies on the sketches to illustrate the narrative. She does embed some relevant commentary in these profiles, but they are mostly asides, the major points of which land largely because they are juxtaposed against the folly of boomers or other obvious failures that happened to coincide with the boomer heyday. Even then, Andrews alleges that she chose the figures to profile not because they were "altogether a villain or a victim" but rather that they represent "some aspect of the boomer tragedy in all its complexity." This position incidentally shifts responsibility from a generational cohort to broader forces, which she references as "judicial activism, imperialism, the digital revolution." The residual ambivalence Andrews retains about the generation of her own parents (and mine) can blunt her polemical edge, making a precise ascertainment of her position on all topics presented sometimes ambiguous.
However, there are many wildly entertaining passages in the book (I have shared some excerpts some at Substack). Andrews is undeniably a talented and sharp wit. One would do well to avoid provoking her ire.
Despite some of the Andrews' often strong though sometimes unconventional conservatism, I hope left-of-center readers pick Boomers up. The "Ok, Boomer" insult did originate from a younger generation of left-wing activists after-all, and one of Andrews' contentions is that the boomers hollowed out any authentic form of left-wing class politics in America. However, her conservatism extends beyond a deference for private property, inherent patriotism, and traditional or familial social values. She has a stronger vision for the role of religion in public life. This emerges in her chapter on Sotomayor in which she traces how judicial activism, a kind she seems as inconsistent with the American Founding and almost all historical forms of civic organization, forever disrupted America's ability to transmitted religiosity across generations.
This is all I have to say for now, but I hope to return with a deeper look at each of the biographical sketches and the implicit argument Andrews is making in each. Stay tuned and in the meantime check this book out.
My extended commentary on Boomers is at Substack
August 31, 2021
Shit book. She doesn’t successfully connect how the boomers in question exemplify why the boomers are the worst generation. Seems like it’s all an attempt to gloss over the fact that the reason the boomers suck is not just that they were indeed handed everything by their parents and pulled the ladder up for their kids, which Andrews addresses, but it’s that they did it by voting for Reagan and then the neocons. They took the lessons and heartache they learned in Vietnam and then gave the millenials Afghanistan and Iraq. They took the affordable education they received and saddled us (millenials) with student debt. They took the social safety nets they benefited from and cut them. On and on.
Anyway. The boomers suck because they went ultra conservative, not because of liberalism. She tops it off by bitching about millenials and mentioning Pink Floyd patches and Che shirts, comparing the pothead millenials from her high school to the boomers they were rebelling against- IGNORING that those boomers ditched the Floyd and Che around 1979 and traded them for Brooks brothers and 401k (the “Che shirt” trope is so tired). Millenials by contrast are going further left as a generation, unlike their boomer parents.
Anyway, hated this book. Don’t read it.
Anyway. The boomers suck because they went ultra conservative, not because of liberalism. She tops it off by bitching about millenials and mentioning Pink Floyd patches and Che shirts, comparing the pothead millenials from her high school to the boomers they were rebelling against- IGNORING that those boomers ditched the Floyd and Che around 1979 and traded them for Brooks brothers and 401k (the “Che shirt” trope is so tired). Millenials by contrast are going further left as a generation, unlike their boomer parents.
Anyway, hated this book. Don’t read it.
February 11, 2021
I never thought that I’d have a least favorite book, and yet... here we are.
June 23, 2021
Starting around 2008 I suspected the Baby Boomer generation had gotten it easy and were leaving the younger generations the bill, while still snubbing the older ones. They are a generation that had unquestioned cultural dominance from 1965-1990 (and relevance until 2015), when they shifted to political dominance (which they still hold). I guess that makes me a perfect audience for this collection of essays on the likes of Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonya Sotomayor.
Among conservative authors in 2021, Helen Andrews is one of the smarter ones, more perceptive than dogmatic. One will not hear any free-market platitudes. So there is no surprise her targets are, save maybe Paglia (she is really sui generis I would say), figures broadly popular among Democrats, if not true Leftists of the Marx and antifa variety. Still, a snub at a figure or two on the right would have been welcome.
Boomers is relatively fair to its topics, save maybe Sotomayor, who is treated in the most negative light. Jobs is likely the one treated the most positively. Paglia and Sharpton come in for some of the most biting critiques, but with pockets of genuine praise. Both are also discussed within the the world they inhabit. Yet, as much as I enjoyed the book and its measured iconoclasm, Andrews never seemed to fully connect the dots, either within the essays but most especially between the various figures. Sachs and Sotomayor in particular suffer from this. All of the essays cry out for a biting concluding paragraph, but only a few manage to have just that. This is not a great book. Nor a near great book, but a good one and I hope Andrews can continue to develop.
Among conservative authors in 2021, Helen Andrews is one of the smarter ones, more perceptive than dogmatic. One will not hear any free-market platitudes. So there is no surprise her targets are, save maybe Paglia (she is really sui generis I would say), figures broadly popular among Democrats, if not true Leftists of the Marx and antifa variety. Still, a snub at a figure or two on the right would have been welcome.
Boomers is relatively fair to its topics, save maybe Sotomayor, who is treated in the most negative light. Jobs is likely the one treated the most positively. Paglia and Sharpton come in for some of the most biting critiques, but with pockets of genuine praise. Both are also discussed within the the world they inhabit. Yet, as much as I enjoyed the book and its measured iconoclasm, Andrews never seemed to fully connect the dots, either within the essays but most especially between the various figures. Sachs and Sotomayor in particular suffer from this. All of the essays cry out for a biting concluding paragraph, but only a few manage to have just that. This is not a great book. Nor a near great book, but a good one and I hope Andrews can continue to develop.
February 6, 2021
DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK!
I have a bone to pick Jeffrey Sachs, so I truly read this book with an open mind. Unfortunately, this book is shoddily researched and poorly written, and Helen Andrews is intellectually dishonest and borderline racist. Check out the chosen targets of her critique--all the classic foils of Conservative propaganda : Justice Sotomayor (Latina), Al Sharpton (Black), Steve Jobs (Half-Arab Californian), Aaron Sorkin (Jewish), Jeff Sachs (Jewish), Camille Paglia (Feminist). Really, Helen? You couldn't at least pretend to be unbiased by throwing in the Enron guys or something?!
This is a classic attempt by an author attempting to latch on to zeitgeist to peddle propaganda. The Boomer generation, like every generation, is worthy of critique and analysis, sure. But this mediocre author was fast-tracked by publishers to capitalize on the OK-Boomer meme, all part of the frantic attempt to muddy the water with both-sides-ism so as to distract from how Conservatives are terrible at governing by most conceivable measures.
Just check out the other reviews on this site, the people who love this book aren't as subtle as Helen:
“After all, with maybe some very rare exceptions, the colonized were never better off than under colonialism—something that I am certain will get even more true as the world spins apart over the next decade or two, returning those sections of the world now totally dependent on Western handouts to the barbarism from which they came.” -Charles Haywood, Review of 'Boomers', Feb 03, 2021
JUST, WOW... LIKE, WOW.
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!
I have a bone to pick Jeffrey Sachs, so I truly read this book with an open mind. Unfortunately, this book is shoddily researched and poorly written, and Helen Andrews is intellectually dishonest and borderline racist. Check out the chosen targets of her critique--all the classic foils of Conservative propaganda : Justice Sotomayor (Latina), Al Sharpton (Black), Steve Jobs (Half-Arab Californian), Aaron Sorkin (Jewish), Jeff Sachs (Jewish), Camille Paglia (Feminist). Really, Helen? You couldn't at least pretend to be unbiased by throwing in the Enron guys or something?!
This is a classic attempt by an author attempting to latch on to zeitgeist to peddle propaganda. The Boomer generation, like every generation, is worthy of critique and analysis, sure. But this mediocre author was fast-tracked by publishers to capitalize on the OK-Boomer meme, all part of the frantic attempt to muddy the water with both-sides-ism so as to distract from how Conservatives are terrible at governing by most conceivable measures.
Just check out the other reviews on this site, the people who love this book aren't as subtle as Helen:
“After all, with maybe some very rare exceptions, the colonized were never better off than under colonialism—something that I am certain will get even more true as the world spins apart over the next decade or two, returning those sections of the world now totally dependent on Western handouts to the barbarism from which they came.” -Charles Haywood, Review of 'Boomers', Feb 03, 2021
JUST, WOW... LIKE, WOW.
DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!
March 26, 2021
She had me at "subliterate orgy dens".
There's a lot of wit on display here. Better, there's a deep well of anecdotes, many I've never heard before. I didn't know General Motor's sponsorship of a TV special on the Lincoln Assassination came with a demand the script never once mention FORD theater!
But that's just a weird aside. This book really dishes the dirt on six famous boomers: Jobs, Sorkin, Sachs, Paglia, Sharpton, and Sotomayor. Oddly, my opinion of Sharpton rose a bit--I certainly have more sympathy for where he was coming from--but my opinion of the rest has sunk. Especially Sotomayor, whom I no longer regard merely as a partisan, but also as one of the ultra-entitled who yet clings to the mantle of Oppressed Outsider.
This book makes a nice companion to Ross Douthat's recent book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. It also shows how strong a polemic can be when compared to The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, which I thought failed to back up its assertions.
There's a lot of wit on display here. Better, there's a deep well of anecdotes, many I've never heard before. I didn't know General Motor's sponsorship of a TV special on the Lincoln Assassination came with a demand the script never once mention FORD theater!
But that's just a weird aside. This book really dishes the dirt on six famous boomers: Jobs, Sorkin, Sachs, Paglia, Sharpton, and Sotomayor. Oddly, my opinion of Sharpton rose a bit--I certainly have more sympathy for where he was coming from--but my opinion of the rest has sunk. Especially Sotomayor, whom I no longer regard merely as a partisan, but also as one of the ultra-entitled who yet clings to the mantle of Oppressed Outsider.
This book makes a nice companion to Ross Douthat's recent book The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. It also shows how strong a polemic can be when compared to The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, which I thought failed to back up its assertions.
June 12, 2021
The book essentially picks six liberal boomers and complains about how they made the world more liberal. I was a bit surprised the author characterized a generation via six individuals, especially a generation who is usually considered to be pretty conservative (or at least they think they are).
March 15, 2021
picked this up at the library, should have read the dust cover to realize it was written by a conservative weirdo. Helen, your book is bad
April 15, 2024
Started off with interesting tidbits but I didn't end up liking the format once it got to chapters on particular boomers.
March 31, 2025
In Boomers, Helen Andrews delivers a scathing yet entertaining critique of the Baby Boomer generation by profiling six emblematic figures: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. Drawing inspiration from Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, Andrews uses biography as a vehicle for cultural analysis, arguing that while Boomers promised liberation, authenticity, and progress, they often left behind chaos, narcissism, and broken institutions. Andrews writes with biting wit and unapologetic clarity. Each chapter stands alone as a profile, but together they weave a generational indictment.
Fantastic book and Andrew’s writes it with undeniable wit. She is undoubtedly more fair than I would have been. Love it or hate it, Boomers is guaranteed to provoke strong reactions. It’s a sharp, engaging work that dares to ask whether the most powerful generation in modern history ultimately lived up to its promises—or betrayed them.
Fantastic book and Andrew’s writes it with undeniable wit. She is undoubtedly more fair than I would have been. Love it or hate it, Boomers is guaranteed to provoke strong reactions. It’s a sharp, engaging work that dares to ask whether the most powerful generation in modern history ultimately lived up to its promises—or betrayed them.
February 11, 2021
This is not academic. This is not a deep dive into every fault of the Boomers as shown by data and analysis. This is rhetoric, plain and simple. Every chapter looks at the life of a famous Boomer, and how they do or do not exemplify that generation. It's not a typical approach, but it's one that works perfectly. There are so many zingers in this text that it works as pure entertainment, but it also levels some serious charges. Highly recommend.
February 2, 2021
I wrote a full length review of this book here. Check it: https://theamericansun.com/2021/02/02...
December 9, 2022
Hilarious book. Several chapters are top notch reading. Not sure why it has low ratings, but perhaps because of the left-wing tilt of Goodreads voters.
June 22, 2024
This book is a reasonably enjoyable tour of the vices of boomerism. Modelled on the format of Lytton Strachey’s “Eminent Victorians”, it explores everything that boomers have done wrong through six character studies.
I found the writing to be a bit disjointed, and overall Andrews is too fair to the boomers for it to be a true book in the style of Eminent Victorians, being prepared to ascribe some good motives to the worst generation, even if it all turned out wrong.
The overall thesis of the book is that the boomer generation was the first generation to leave the world in a worse state than it was in when they came of age (fairly uncontroversial, at least in the modern era), that in someways they were motivated by the right – or at least worthy – ideas, but that they utterly botched the execution of these ideas, and in so doing left the world in a worse place for all their efforts.
The first case study is Steve Jobs. Andrews is actually prepared to give Jobs a measure of respect, in that he actually achieved something of note in creating the Apple company and some fantastic pieces of computer equipment, and so on. His errors seem to be appointing the boomer par excellence, Tim Cook, to be his replacement (a heinous crime of itself, Cook being the CEO who finally achieved the offshoring of all Apple’s factories, something Steve Jobs had never been prepared to do), but also to be one of the people primarily responsible for one of the major evils of our current time in that so many people are addicted to their smart phones today thanks to his innovations.
The next case study is Aaron Sorkin, writer of the 90s TV show, The West Wing. Sorkin is more used as a vehicle to begin a discussion of the deterioration of TV and movies under the leadership of the boomers into essentially unwatchable, moralising claptrap.
Jeffrey Sacks, the famous “development economist“, is profiled, though Andrews doesn’t really land a punch on him. The downfall in this chapter is that Andrews is writing from an American Conservative (ugh, I know) perspective, and so in using Sacks as a vehicle to criticise the economic outcomes achieved by the boomers she’s not really prepared to criticise someone like Ronald Regan though she is prepared to (rightfully) pillory the economic and other policies of Bill Clinton. The overall thesis of this section is that the boomers have been responsible for unleashing a plague of neoliberalism on economies across the world, and this has had deleterious effects on every aspect of society. There is also in this chapter, incidentally, a well-argued defence of the old European colonial empires, and a discussion of the fact that the United States in the post Second World War era has built itself an empire in all but name. The problem with this is that because the United States is avowedly anti-imperial, they can’t say that they’ve built an empire, and they also can’t administer it effectively due to this cognitive dissonance, so every action costs far more than it should, and is far less effective than it should be, because all of the imperial activities carried out by the United States have to be funnelled through charities and NGOs, whereas the British would simply have put a colonial administrator in place to carry everything out.
Camille LaPaglia is the vehicle for a discussion of the obvious and seemingly irreversible decline in academic standards in higher education across the western world. The thesis here is that LaPaglia pioneered a sort of academia of pop culture, which had the unintended consequence of devaluing high culture and the canon that had come before it. It also discusses the model of aggressive, tearing down and patronism by which LaPaglia rose to academic prominence and the stranglehold that she has over her field, despite not publishing any new ideas in decades, as a case study of the decline of academia as a whole.
Al Sharpton, the famous civil rights campaigner, is profiled as an example of how politicians and political activists who see themselves as “transformational“ in fact end up achieving much less in many cases than politicians who are more “transactional“ and are prepared to do deals to make incremental positive change. Andrews’ thesis is that if incremental change takes place via transactional policies then it allows societal changes to develop with democratic approval, and with time for the changes to be bedded down and implemented properly. Transformational or symbolic politicians and activists skip this step in favour of making big radical changes fast, which often has unintended consequences which undermine their project. This is one of the better chapters in the book, though if you’re going to get upset reading about the corruption and bad motivations of various civil rights activists…you may not enjoy it.
The final case study is of Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court judge, who is characterised as a bully raised up far beyond her level of competence. This is really a vehicle to discuss the way in which the law has been corrupted in the post Second World War era, from public interest litigation coming to dominate the politics of the United States, and the willingness of activist judges to throw away centuries of legal precedent for political reasons. This chapter is very well argued, though not all that enlightening about Sotomayor herself.
The downfall of the book is that it’s overall disjointed, and doesn’t actually do that good a job of applying each case study to the overall thesis. It’s more a piece of entertainment for you to confirm your prejudices as a boomer-hater. It also doesn’t really explore the inter-generational issues between the boomers and the following generations—which is surely one of their worst aspects…for example being themselves the beneficiaries of being able to buy a cheap house then deliberately making it impossible for their children to do so…or themselves being the product of a stable society but raising their own children in broken faithless families … or the truly staggering levels of government debt that have been built-up in all western societies, whereby the boomer generation has enriched itself through low taxes and high government spending, which will have to be paid for by their children and grandchildren…these issues are alluded to but never elucidated.
Overall: fairly light and enjoyable; recommended as entertainment.
I found the writing to be a bit disjointed, and overall Andrews is too fair to the boomers for it to be a true book in the style of Eminent Victorians, being prepared to ascribe some good motives to the worst generation, even if it all turned out wrong.
The overall thesis of the book is that the boomer generation was the first generation to leave the world in a worse state than it was in when they came of age (fairly uncontroversial, at least in the modern era), that in someways they were motivated by the right – or at least worthy – ideas, but that they utterly botched the execution of these ideas, and in so doing left the world in a worse place for all their efforts.
The first case study is Steve Jobs. Andrews is actually prepared to give Jobs a measure of respect, in that he actually achieved something of note in creating the Apple company and some fantastic pieces of computer equipment, and so on. His errors seem to be appointing the boomer par excellence, Tim Cook, to be his replacement (a heinous crime of itself, Cook being the CEO who finally achieved the offshoring of all Apple’s factories, something Steve Jobs had never been prepared to do), but also to be one of the people primarily responsible for one of the major evils of our current time in that so many people are addicted to their smart phones today thanks to his innovations.
The next case study is Aaron Sorkin, writer of the 90s TV show, The West Wing. Sorkin is more used as a vehicle to begin a discussion of the deterioration of TV and movies under the leadership of the boomers into essentially unwatchable, moralising claptrap.
Jeffrey Sacks, the famous “development economist“, is profiled, though Andrews doesn’t really land a punch on him. The downfall in this chapter is that Andrews is writing from an American Conservative (ugh, I know) perspective, and so in using Sacks as a vehicle to criticise the economic outcomes achieved by the boomers she’s not really prepared to criticise someone like Ronald Regan though she is prepared to (rightfully) pillory the economic and other policies of Bill Clinton. The overall thesis of this section is that the boomers have been responsible for unleashing a plague of neoliberalism on economies across the world, and this has had deleterious effects on every aspect of society. There is also in this chapter, incidentally, a well-argued defence of the old European colonial empires, and a discussion of the fact that the United States in the post Second World War era has built itself an empire in all but name. The problem with this is that because the United States is avowedly anti-imperial, they can’t say that they’ve built an empire, and they also can’t administer it effectively due to this cognitive dissonance, so every action costs far more than it should, and is far less effective than it should be, because all of the imperial activities carried out by the United States have to be funnelled through charities and NGOs, whereas the British would simply have put a colonial administrator in place to carry everything out.
Camille LaPaglia is the vehicle for a discussion of the obvious and seemingly irreversible decline in academic standards in higher education across the western world. The thesis here is that LaPaglia pioneered a sort of academia of pop culture, which had the unintended consequence of devaluing high culture and the canon that had come before it. It also discusses the model of aggressive, tearing down and patronism by which LaPaglia rose to academic prominence and the stranglehold that she has over her field, despite not publishing any new ideas in decades, as a case study of the decline of academia as a whole.
Al Sharpton, the famous civil rights campaigner, is profiled as an example of how politicians and political activists who see themselves as “transformational“ in fact end up achieving much less in many cases than politicians who are more “transactional“ and are prepared to do deals to make incremental positive change. Andrews’ thesis is that if incremental change takes place via transactional policies then it allows societal changes to develop with democratic approval, and with time for the changes to be bedded down and implemented properly. Transformational or symbolic politicians and activists skip this step in favour of making big radical changes fast, which often has unintended consequences which undermine their project. This is one of the better chapters in the book, though if you’re going to get upset reading about the corruption and bad motivations of various civil rights activists…you may not enjoy it.
The final case study is of Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court judge, who is characterised as a bully raised up far beyond her level of competence. This is really a vehicle to discuss the way in which the law has been corrupted in the post Second World War era, from public interest litigation coming to dominate the politics of the United States, and the willingness of activist judges to throw away centuries of legal precedent for political reasons. This chapter is very well argued, though not all that enlightening about Sotomayor herself.
The downfall of the book is that it’s overall disjointed, and doesn’t actually do that good a job of applying each case study to the overall thesis. It’s more a piece of entertainment for you to confirm your prejudices as a boomer-hater. It also doesn’t really explore the inter-generational issues between the boomers and the following generations—which is surely one of their worst aspects…for example being themselves the beneficiaries of being able to buy a cheap house then deliberately making it impossible for their children to do so…or themselves being the product of a stable society but raising their own children in broken faithless families … or the truly staggering levels of government debt that have been built-up in all western societies, whereby the boomer generation has enriched itself through low taxes and high government spending, which will have to be paid for by their children and grandchildren…these issues are alluded to but never elucidated.
Overall: fairly light and enjoyable; recommended as entertainment.
July 5, 2021
To most members of my generation (Gen Z), the primary defect of the Baby Boomers is their adoption of Reaganism during the 1980s and their betrayal of progressive social causes. This book covers none of that. Instead, Andrews blathers on for 197 pages about the usual conservative bug bears from the 1960s.
Feminism is bad because of no-fault divorce, the pill, and women entering the workforce. Pay no attention to the fact that a majority of American women voluntarily entered the workforce without the prodding of Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. Also, god forbid women be allowed to leave loveless, abusive relationships for happier arrangements.
Andrews, in her chapters on Al Sharpton and Sonia Sotomayor, puts down the dog whistle and uses a bullhorn to voice her retrograde views of race. For example, she goes on a tangent about Chief Justice Earl Warren being the worst justice in the SCOTUS’ history. CJ Warren just happens to be the judge who ruled against segregation and expanded Americans’ civil liberties.
There’s countless other examples of Andrews’ bad takes, but honestly I don’t want to give her anymore attention than she deserves. In the end, you’re better off reading the works of Rick Perlstein, Kurt Andersen, or Sean Wilentz to understand where the Baby Boom generation went wrong. Spoilers: they did not go wrong with civil rights, feminism, drug liberalization, pop culture, or activism. They went wrong by abandoning those values that Andrews hates.
Feminism is bad because of no-fault divorce, the pill, and women entering the workforce. Pay no attention to the fact that a majority of American women voluntarily entered the workforce without the prodding of Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem. Also, god forbid women be allowed to leave loveless, abusive relationships for happier arrangements.
Andrews, in her chapters on Al Sharpton and Sonia Sotomayor, puts down the dog whistle and uses a bullhorn to voice her retrograde views of race. For example, she goes on a tangent about Chief Justice Earl Warren being the worst justice in the SCOTUS’ history. CJ Warren just happens to be the judge who ruled against segregation and expanded Americans’ civil liberties.
There’s countless other examples of Andrews’ bad takes, but honestly I don’t want to give her anymore attention than she deserves. In the end, you’re better off reading the works of Rick Perlstein, Kurt Andersen, or Sean Wilentz to understand where the Baby Boom generation went wrong. Spoilers: they did not go wrong with civil rights, feminism, drug liberalization, pop culture, or activism. They went wrong by abandoning those values that Andrews hates.
February 4, 2021
I really enjoyed this book, even though I am a baby boomer! The authors assertion that the baby boomer generation is one of the most dreadful ever, is one that I have suspected for a long time, mainly a consequence of my experiences with millennials in the work place, and wondering to myself, "Who raised these people? Did their parents ever say "no" to them? Do they really believe all those participation awards they got are really worth anything?" Naturally, the baby boomer generation is painted with a broad brush here, and the book is more a clever, snarky and funny diatribe than a rigid sociological study. Likewise, the brief biological sketches are more an opportunity to digress than dig deep into each personality. Nevertheless, I recommend this as great entertainment with some nuggets of truth.
February 13, 2021
acerbic, concisely-written essays about the boomer archetypes responsible for "the way we live now." regardless of whether one disagrees with andrews' conclusions, he or she will appreciate the entertaining arrangement of historical material as well as andrews' extraordinary brevity. i've read andrews in first things and elsewhere, been edited by her at TAC even, and applaud her ability to condense large amounts of information into digestible sentences and paragraphs. as a result, the book, serious though its charges against the boomers might be, can be finished in an afternoon
February 17, 2021
Helen Andrews is always fun to read and is always willing to make arguments no one else will in the smartest and fairest way possible. This book is no exception. I only wish she could've been given more room to explore these people and ideas more - the book feels slightly underbaked, but I suspect the blame there lies less with the writer and more on the constraints placed by the modern publishing industry that prefers publishing shallow and slapdash work.
April 15, 2021
I just happened to pick this up at my local library and thought it looked interesting. Unfortunately, after a few chapters, I began to wonder about the author I was reading as they seemingly just took punches at liberalism versus the boomer generation in general. I found some points to be interesting, but the constant need to point out how wrong the libs are got tiring.
October 27, 2023
The Boomers were the generation that made everything about them. When they were rebellious teenagers, they made so much fuss about it that they invented the concept of teen rebellion. When their academics wrote books grounded in post-modernist theories of power and oppression, they created a world that was divisive and fractured.
The fruits of these seeds are only just taking form, now that those rebellious academics have become CEOs and media bosses. They have curated a fractured and weakened society full of virtue signalling and loudly proclaimed victimhood.
When they were long past their prime, Boomers still controlled the media and were the gatekeepers of "cool", with everyone from Mick Jagger to the ever-undying Beatles defining the terms of the art. Decades later, the lockdowns of project Covid were all about keeping the Boomers safe, even if every young person on the planet had to sacrifice their summers and childhood to make sure grandma stayed OK.
With such open goals, it's interesting that this book manages to miss just about every shot it takes.
Okay, so let's be fair. It's a biased and opinionated book. Nothing wrong with that. It's also written by somebody on the right who makes no attempt to be balanced or impartial when categorising those on the left. Fair enough. If you feel passionately about it, let it out.
But I was hoping for something more informative. In the last chapter the author says she's left out key moments of the Boomer's history, but that's the problem. It doesn't really help me to understand the situation at all. When talking about a whole generation of people, taking a handful of liberals that you don't like and using their worst activities as straw-man models of Boomerism is both lazy and unfair. You can cherry pick examples from just about anyone's life if you look hard enough.
I still believe that Boomers have way more to answer for than the things for which we generally hold them accountable. Now that they are finally vanishing from the the top positions at their turn-up-and-get-paid-jobs-for-life to take up their massively over-generous pensions (which we'll be paying for long after they're dead) I'm convinced that it's finally time for Generation X (the last adult generation) to provide a better foundation for the emerging talents of Generation Alpha to build on. It's already too late for Gen Z and Millennials - both have already been captured by the machines of cultural self-destruction that the Boomers set in motion.
I'm disappointed because I didn't find the clarity I was looking for in these pages.
The fruits of these seeds are only just taking form, now that those rebellious academics have become CEOs and media bosses. They have curated a fractured and weakened society full of virtue signalling and loudly proclaimed victimhood.
When they were long past their prime, Boomers still controlled the media and were the gatekeepers of "cool", with everyone from Mick Jagger to the ever-undying Beatles defining the terms of the art. Decades later, the lockdowns of project Covid were all about keeping the Boomers safe, even if every young person on the planet had to sacrifice their summers and childhood to make sure grandma stayed OK.
With such open goals, it's interesting that this book manages to miss just about every shot it takes.
Okay, so let's be fair. It's a biased and opinionated book. Nothing wrong with that. It's also written by somebody on the right who makes no attempt to be balanced or impartial when categorising those on the left. Fair enough. If you feel passionately about it, let it out.
But I was hoping for something more informative. In the last chapter the author says she's left out key moments of the Boomer's history, but that's the problem. It doesn't really help me to understand the situation at all. When talking about a whole generation of people, taking a handful of liberals that you don't like and using their worst activities as straw-man models of Boomerism is both lazy and unfair. You can cherry pick examples from just about anyone's life if you look hard enough.
I still believe that Boomers have way more to answer for than the things for which we generally hold them accountable. Now that they are finally vanishing from the the top positions at their turn-up-and-get-paid-jobs-for-life to take up their massively over-generous pensions (which we'll be paying for long after they're dead) I'm convinced that it's finally time for Generation X (the last adult generation) to provide a better foundation for the emerging talents of Generation Alpha to build on. It's already too late for Gen Z and Millennials - both have already been captured by the machines of cultural self-destruction that the Boomers set in motion.
I'm disappointed because I didn't find the clarity I was looking for in these pages.
September 13, 2021
"Boomers" is very esoteric and is written by a conservative writer, so if you are left-leaning this is not the book for you. Andrews' thesis is that the Baby Boomer Generation inherited the best version of the United States there has ever been and they ruined it. In order to prove her thesis, she profiles six prominent baby boomers: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. Her profiles are not so much each boomer's bio but his/her contributions to American society and the lasting effects of those contributions - most of them not positive. Some of the profiles contain long passages that the reader can get bogged down in - they are dry - and if you don't have even a smattering of knowledge about the person being profiled, you can get lost. I did especially in the Jeffrey Sachs profile. For me, the first three profiles were less interesting, the last three much more so. I learned a lot about transactional politics versus transformational politics, about how the Supreme Court has changed, and how and why the culture of America is so different today than it was 50 years ago. Andrews' last chapter is about the millennials and how they are making many of the same mistakes as the boomers made, even though the millennials profess to hate what their parents did to the country!
If you are not interested in the current cultural and political climate Americans find themselves in today, skip this book. Also, if you are not conservative, I would skip it. But if you feel that this country is going in the wrong direction and wonder how we got to this place, read this book. You'll have a much better understanding of how it happened.
If you are not interested in the current cultural and political climate Americans find themselves in today, skip this book. Also, if you are not conservative, I would skip it. But if you feel that this country is going in the wrong direction and wonder how we got to this place, read this book. You'll have a much better understanding of how it happened.
February 1, 2021
Vague ramblings that remind me of the Soviet nomenklatura scrambling to look disident once the regime was down. Of course Andrews is not going to upset the establishment. The evil is Jobs that hired industrial designers and none of the long list of Presidents that bombed distant lands so the public won't hear about their affairs. The evil is Sacks who promoted products and not the long list of Ministers that make the public buy whatever the political lobby asks - they call that subventions and as they come from the taxes, it is the general public that actually buys the food that won't sell. So yea, Andrews is a simple mind and its simple thoughts.
June 7, 2021
This 2021 work stuck me as somewhat wayward; I was interested in what the author had to say, but often perplexed at what the consistent theme was. The subtitle indicates that the book will have a common theme of the great disaster that is the Baby Boom generation. Of course, you can't accurately generalize across a giant group of people, so right off the bat the thesis gets compromised. But the author instead profiles six individuals, with some commonality among their intentions, mistakes, and consequences.
It felt to me as is she (and her publisher) wanted her to be angrier and more critical about the Baby Boomers than the book turned out to be. The profiles themselves are generally thoughtful and balanced, and some make interesting analyses. But they're sandwiched between a more confrontational and hostile Preface and Afterword.
Some of the writing is first-rate. There are also times when the book feels too much like a collection of assertions and anecdotes, without adequate substantiation of points through data. Overall, it held my interest but didn't always feel as if it delivered on its premise.
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