Helen AndrewsCritiques

Interesting albeit a bit light. I only got through the first two mini-biographies, that of Steve Jobs and that of Aaron Sorkin. The author sees Jobs as a very atypical boomer, more of an anti-boomer, and I think she is correct. I had never heard of Aaron Sorkin, but I had seen 15 minutes of The West Wing + an SNL skit (back when SNL was funny) about The West Wing. I'm looking forward to the other biographies, but the book is due back at the library soon, and so I'm leaving off now.

I wrote a full length review of this book here. Check it: https://theamericansun.com/2021/02/02/boomers-beyond-the-meme/

Biographical sketches degenerate into essays and the book becomes much better when they do. Al Sharpton as the launching pad for transactional vs. transformational politics with revisionist history on political machines and racial integration was particularly insightful.

Despite her insistence that she found something to like in all of the individuals profiled Andrews clearly has nothing but antipathy for Sotomayor. Paglia, Jobs, and to a lesser degree Sorkin are all tragic in that their admirable qualities were perverted by their circumstance - their birth at the wrong time in the wrong country.

At times she undermines her own contention that the boomer disaster was avoidable. Pornography - nobody wanted it but nobody fought against it. School prayer - its staunch advocates within months decided it was unimportant, or actually good, that it was gone. Could pornography and the rollback of Christianity been stopped if the boomers' parents had been more alert to the danger? The true disaster is that we'll never know.

"If you've never belonged to something, you've never had to defend something, so you can hate everything."

"Teaching religion is like teaching a language - learn one language and you can learn another. Learn no language and you're a feral wolf boy forever."