Boomers, Helen Andrews
Boomers, Helen Andrews
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Boomers
The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

Author: Helen Andrews

Narrator: Nicole Parnell

Unabridged: 7 hr 9 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 01/12/2021


Synopsis

"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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Kris

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 doe......more

Goodreads review by Sean

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 politi......more


Quotes

“Helen Andrews has written the first book to treat the Baby Boomers not just as youthful dreamers but also as ruthless wielders of power, and to account for what their dreams have cost us. A groundbreaking reassessment of the last generation by one of the bravest and best writers of this one.”—Christopher Caldwell, author of The Age of Entitlement

“Baby boomers (and I confess I am one): prepare to squirm and shake your increasingly arthritic little fists. For here comes essayist Helen Andrews, incendiary new critic of left-wing pieties, youthful scourge of 'disastrous' sixties idealism and its legacies, and all-round millennial conservative whippersnapper par excellence. Even when infuriating or wrong—and Andrews can be both—she is irresistibly intelligent, writes like a dream, and asks questions so uncomfortable and fundamental that the bravery, honesty, and moral seriousness of her approach cannot be gainsaid. Boomers—shall we go there?—is an essential book for our woebegotten time. Excuse me, folks, while I kiss the sky.”—Terry Castle, Walter A. Haas Professor of the Humanities at Stanford University, author of The Professor

“As a committed but self-hating Baby Boomer, I've read Helen Andrews' work with an uneasy mixture of trepidation and admiration—admiration because she combines a luminous intelligence with a wit that's as glistening and sharp as a straight razor, and trepidation because I realize she is about to turn those weapons on me and my kind. We deserve it, of course, but that doesn't make it any less scary.”—Andrew Ferguson, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of Crazy U and Land of Lincoln