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  • Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up
  • Steven Mintz
Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up. By Victor D. Brooks. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. 2009.

The baby boomers, the cohort born between 1946 and 1964, is, as sociologist Paul C. Light noted in 1988, "the most analyzed, overgeneralized, stereotyped, and caricatured generation" in American history. Constituting nearly a third of the U.S. population, this age group has long been thought of as a distinctive generation which fundamentally altered American attitudes and behavior for better or worse. To their proponents, the baby boomers constituted a uniquely idealistic generation which liberalized attitudes toward dress, demeanor, gender, grooming, race, sexuality, and work and helped to make the United States a more tolerant and less rigid and repressed society. To their detractors, members of this cohort, showered from birth with attention and resources and raised permissibly according to the tenets of Dr. Benjamin Spock, grew up to become a spoiled, selfish "me" generation which has had a particularly difficult time sustaining relationships and assuming responsibilities.

As Victor D. Brooks, like earlier scholars such as Doug Owran and Landon Jones, shows, several factors contributed to a sense of a distinctive generational identity: These included the cohort's size—75 million, 25 million more than in the preceding 19 years, which made it "the pig" in the demographic "python"; the relative affluence of its childhood, which contrasted markedly with their parents' depression and wartime upbringing; and its association with the broader social and cultural phenomena, such as the growth of suburbs and the postwar consumer culture, the birth of television, the cultural upheavals and movements of the 1960s, drug experimentation, rock music, and the divisions spawned by the Vietnam war.

Brooks follows this cohorts' experience from birth through the 1960s. For many older readers, the book offers a highly evocative stroll through memory lane, with captivating references to fads, movies, music, television shows, and toys. Boomers identifies several distinctive features of a postwar childhood, such as the importance of neighborhood-based peer groups; the significance of negotiation and bargaining in large families; the Cold War tensions that colored childhood; and the sense of a common generational identity fostered in schools and by television, movies, and music. Especially interesting are the discussions of family relations (especially sibling rivalry) and of the "tug of war" between pre- and post-World War II values, evident, for example, in girls' fashion, where an informal tomboy look of overalls and pigtails collided with more formal dresses and bangs, or in the cultural value attached to a stay-at-home, full-time mother and the increasing tendency of married women to enter the paid labor force.

What one most wants to know is how this cohort's historical experience shaped this its politics, outlook, and behavior, a challenge all the greater because baby boomers are not a homogeneous group (with the oldest boomers maturing at a time when the economy was expanding and the young in a period of stagflation). What Brooks suggests implicitly is that the baby boomers' upbringing had contradictory consequences, on the one hand, spawning a sense of entitlement, a heightened preoccupation with self-fulfillment, and [End Page 228] generational chauvinism (the sense that their generation constituted the most enlightened, privileged, and moral generation ever), and on the other, a somewhat skeptical or critical attitude toward conventional conceptions of gender roles, parental authority, government, religion, and the workplace—an outlook that could lead in either conservative or liberal directions. Brooks's book is one of a number of new or forthcoming books which will help us move beyond myth, caricature, nostalgic memories, and gross overgeneralization and better understand the lasting imprint of an age cohorts' upbringing and formative experiences.

Steven Mintz
Columbia University
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