Review: Boomers by Helen Andrews. Talk-k-k-k-k-ing Bout Their Generation

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

Four Stars. Nonfiction, social history, pop culture, biographies

This is a fascinating little book. It’s very readable, which is both nice and unusual in this sort of polemic. It’s short too, so you’ll race through it in no time.

The author, Helen Andrews, used the same format as Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. If you aren’t familiar with his book, published in May 1918 (God knows I’d barely heard of it), it’s a series of portraits or hatchet jobs on four eminent citizens who helped make the British Empire what it was. Cardinal Manning, Thomas Arnold, General Charles Gordon, and Florence Nightingale were all long dead by then and so couldn’t complain about how Lytton Strachey savaged their reputations.

Helen Andrews chose six baby boomers for her dissection of how this generation changed American culture for good or ill. They are Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor. With the exception of Steve Jobs, they’re still alive to carp about how Ms. Andrews savages their reputations and legacies. As a result, she, unlike Lytton Strachey, takes care to back up her assertions with extensive footnotes.

She chose these six people to cover six areas of the dramatic, drastic changes that have reshaped our world.

* Steve Jobs is technology and the advent of social media.

* Aaron Sorkin (whom I’d barely heard of) is entertainment and how it shapes how we view the world.

* Jeffrey Sachs (whom I’d never heard of) is economics and non-government organizations.

* Camile Paglia is education and the dumbing down thereof with a side order of porn.

* Al Sharpton is politics and race and how they intertwine.

* Sonia Sotomayor is the judicial system and what happens when cowardly legislatures don’t do their job, thus encouraging judges to enact law instead of interpreting it.

Ms. Andrews barely touches on the usual boomer topics: Vietnam, riots in the streets, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, feminism, civil rights; you know the usual subjects. That’s one of the things that makes this book so interesting. It’s not what you expect.

I was fascinated. I was especially fascinated by how the author interwove the larger societal picture around one person’s life and actions. Al Sharpton’s chapter in particular draws in Jesse Jackson, Tammany Hall, Chicago politics, and a discussion of transactional versus transformational politics. Since I spend some of my time at my municipal meetings, a lot of what she wrote rang true.

Do you want to get things done or do you want to talk about getting things done? Perfect is always the enemy of finished, or often, of even getting started in the first place. Getting things done in politics, especially if you’d like to get reelected, involves small, incremental changes that your constituents, all of them, can tolerate. You have to give up some things to get other things accomplished. You know, compromise.

If your politics is transactional (the spoils system if you want to be crass), there’s a lot of give and take. Your opponents won’t necessarily remain opponents as issues change with the times. Next go round, your opponents will be on your side to get what they want. Yeah, it can be corrupt.

If your politics is transformational — you’re doing things because you want to improve the world and transform it into the utopia you know it can be and the citizens have to get in line because you know what’s best for them — you’ll get a different set of problems.

Your opponents in transformational politics don’t just have different viewpoints. They’re misguided at best, because they want something you disapprove of. At worst, they’re evil, because they don’t agree with your ideology about the correct way to build the shining city upon the hill. And yeah, transformational politics can be just as corrupt as transactional. The difference is ideologists cover up naked self-interest with virtuousness.

One of the most fascinating things about attending your local municipal meetings — I strongly recommend that you do this — is watching caring, concerned citizens argue for radically different outcomes.

Do you want to pay for a Taj Mahal of community centers for your town, complete with a 50-meter Olympic size pool? What a gorgeous facility it will be, the glittering jewel in your town. It will drive business into town too, as your 50-meter pool draws swim meets from up and down the eastern seaboard. Those swim teams will pay for the use of the grand facility, sleep in local hotels, eat in local restaurants, and after they’re done spending piles of money, they go home. They generate revenue far in excess of municipal monies needed for their care.

Except do you want to pay the additional taxes that this amazing new community center that offers every conceivable form of recreational facilities and include the new, improved senior center will cost? We’re talking huge piles of money. Millions of dollars, to be exact, since user fees won’t pay for everything and swim teams don’t compete on a daily basis.

We’ve spent several years arguing about the pros and cons of the new and improved community center here in the township. Political careers have risen and fallen on this issue. Impassioned members of local swim teams and their supporters wept at the podium as they pled their case. Equally impassioned citizens wept at the podium as they pled for lower taxes.

You can’t build a gold-plated facility that’s also free. Someone has to pay for it. The entire book is like this. Series of interlocking stories, the trade-offs, and how one person’s vision really can change how the rest of us think.

So why didn’t I give Ms. Andrews her fifth star? She was missing what I thought was key demographic information. I like my books complete. I don’t want to have to look up the data and I can’t write margin notes in a library book.

There were no birth dates (and in the case of Steve Jobs, his death date). When you were born during the baby boom changes how it affected you. I was born in 1960, making me a boomer. I was seven years old during the summer of love and it meant exactly nothing. As the oldest child in my family, I had no older relatives traipsing around in tie-dye and beads, dodging the draft, or protesting at college to influence me.

I really wanted to see some data detailing where the six individuals were raised. Although Ms. Andrews didn’t spell it out, I got the distinct impression that all six people were raised in cities. Large ones. This matters more than you might think. If you’re raised in some small, isolated town out in the plains of Nebraska or North Dakota, you’ve got a very different mindset than some city kid. If nothing else, you know where food comes from. It’s hard not to when you see huge fields of corn or soybeans on a regular basis. Same thing with cattle raising operations or a hog farm. Live outside a major city and you’ve got a better idea of how critical weather can be and how little control you have over it.

The socioeconomic status of each subject when growing up would have been useful. I’m guessing that Sonia Sotomayor was the only person who grew up in a household where people toiled in a factory. I’m not sure about Al Sharpton, preacher and preacher’s kid. He had his troubles too. Again, people who grow up expecting a college education, new clothes on a seasonal basis, and an annual vacation to some exotic location develop a different mindset from the rest of us.

The other thing I would have liked was pictures. A high school yearbook mugshot along with a current picture would have made me happy. I like seeing who I’m reading about. It’s easier to visualize them. I know what Steve Jobs looks like. I’ve seen Al Sharpton and Sonia Sotomayor in the newspaper. But the other three? I couldn’t pick them out of a police lineup and neither can you.

Even with those caveats, I recommend Boomers. It was fun to read, enough so that I entertained my husband by reading passages aloud to him and he didn’t protest.

If you don’t want to get your copy of Boomers from the library, you can get one here.

Or here, if you don’t like sending money to Amazon and Jeff Bezos (technically a boomer since he was born in 1964).

If you’d like to follow Helen Andrews’s adventures, here’s her website.