It was a generation of oddities and peculiarities: the clothes, beads, beards, hair, words and phrases, and attitudes. The children who grew up in 1950s America playing with hula-hoops and Frisbees would, a decade later, don bell bottoms and miniskirts, grow out their hair and defy their parents, creating their own lifestyle through sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll.
P. J. O'Rourke's "The Baby Boom: How it Got That Way and It Wasn't My Fault and I'll Never Do It Again" is a hilarious trip down memory lane for those of us among the baby boom generation. O' Rourke categorizes the boomers into "Seniors," those born in the years immediately after World War II; the "Juniors," those born in the late 1940s or early 1950s; "Sophomores," the late 1950s; and "Freshmen," children born during the early years of the 1960s. Today, baby boomers make up one-fourth of American citizenry.
"The Baby Boom" is a social history full of gaffs and goofs that led to consciousness raising and ideological struggle as well as outlining the tempestuous relationship between the Greatest Generation, which preceded the baby boomers. O'Rourke writes, "We opposed prejudice, poverty, and war, and annoyed our parents." And, for better or worse, O'Rourke comments, we had an effect on the generation to come after us -- Generation X. Yet boomers, O'Rourke reminds us, "had a sense that they could be or do anything," which differentiated them from other generations. "They took life by the throat and shook it."
While our parents' generation lived to work, boomers worked to live. Despite, the outrageous and sometimes unbelievable things boomers did, they made significant impacts on politics, religion, the economy, social aspects, and science and the arts.
"Right now," O'Rourke attests, "is the perfect moment to weigh in on ourselves," some 70-80 years after the first wave of boomer children were born to "tally up what we have added to and subtracted from existence."
Boomers are the generation that cultivated free love, protested the war in Vietnam and experienced Woodstock. They can count among their successes the bringing down of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, as well as some of the most innovative technological advances in America today. To be sure, there were failures, too, that must be acknowledged: The increase of illegitimate children brought into the world and the significantly high divorce rate in America being but two of them.
Still, the sharp wit and combustible humor of P. J. O'Rourke celebrates the baby boomers and the "mess" we made with comedic truth and laugh-out-loud hilarity.
Kimberly Bolton is a circulation clerk at Missouri River Regional Library.