Review by New York Times Review
Now 66 years old, O'Rourke is well into what Dave Van Ronk might have called his "anecdotage." So it's appropriate that his most recent book is a gentle trip along well-worn lanes of baby boomer memory. The trip takes us from an idyllic '50s childhood of coonskin caps and befinned Buicks, through the drug-addled '60s down to the present. At its best you can hear the ghost of the radio monologuist Jean Shepherd wheezing his appreciation. At its worst, you can see the ghost of Andy Rooney shaking his head and rolling his eyes. A couple of times you get authentic baby boomer pathos - for example, when O'Rourke's buddy Jumbo gets shot down and killed in Vietnam, leading to the line that could be O'Rourke's motto: "You can't make a joke out of everything. But you can keep trying." The book peters out sometime in the Nixon administration, zipping rapidly from there to the present in the last couple of chapters, the suggestion being that baby boomers have been trying to relive their glory days ever since. And, in O'Rourke's view, that's a good thing: Fat, lazy and stupid may be no way to go through life, but it's a path unlikely to lead to World War III. Which makes O'Rourke wonder whether his generation, the one that, in Bob Dole's memorable phrase, "never did anything real," isn't the actual Greatest Generation. At least so far.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 26, 2014]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Prolific political and social commentator O'Rourke, author of 17 books, including the bestselling Parliament of Whores, has created here a thoughtful portrait of the baby boomer generation and what its members have done for the American way of life, and "the way we talked everybody into letting us get away with it." While O'Rourke acknowledges that sweeping generalizations about millions of Americans do not always apply, he seems to feel comfortable enough standardizing boomers at large as creatures of self-interest, hypocrisy, and hysteria. But even while discussing annual income and per capita GDP, O'Rourke maintains the dry wit that makes every chapter a delight, even if the picture they form is incomplete. The hilarity is helped along by plenty of anecdotes from his own life as a boomer, including the tale of when O'Rourke's underground newspaper was occupied overnight by Balto-Cong radicals. As a cultural analyst, O'Rourke's ability and willingness to simultaneously lampoon and celebrate himself and his generation are unequaled. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
What should have been easy picking for the satirist isn't nearly as funny or perceptive as his best work. O'Rourke (Holidays in Heck, 2011, etc.) has made a career out of skewering his generation's liberal pieties and high-minded self-regard. Perhaps he has used up too much of his material or figured that the generational topic was so ripe for caricature that the book would write itself. Yes, the baby boomers are narcissistic, hypocritical, as materialist as they are idealist and obsessed with whatever stage of life they happen to be passing through. "We speak from the heart, and that's not half of it," he writes. "We speak from the gut, from the spleen, from the liver's bile ducts, out our butts, through our hats, even our T shirts can't shut up with the things we have to say, never mind social media and talk radio talk show call-in callers." Point made and taken. O'Rourke's long-windedness reinforces rather than punctures that tendency, as he describes the typical baby boomer's (i.e., his own) family, maturation, sexual awakening, radical acculturation, substance experimentation (though he continues to prefer beer to illegal drugs), and ultimate need to cut his hair, buy a suit and get a job. He spends a surprising amount of time stuck in the 1950s, though it was the '60s that would define this generation, and about which he belabors some obvious points: "It was not, of course, a decade. The Sixties as they are popularly rememberedwas an episode of about 72 months duration when the Baby Boom had fully infested academia and America's various little bohemian enclavesand came to an abrupt halt in 1973 when conscription ended and herpes began." He has the same memories of not attending Woodstock that so many others have, and he even recycles the ancient joke about what the Grateful Dead fan said when he ran out of pot. "Our genius is being funny," writes the author of his generation, but such genius is in short supply here.]]]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
