The Big Answer

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The Amazon blurb says that "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?

With two recessions and a botched pandemic under their belt, the Boomers are their children's favorite punching bag

In Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, 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.

Andrews shows how Steve Jobs tried to liberate everyone's inner rebel but unleashed our stultifying digital world of social media and the gig economy; here's Jobs' iconic iphone

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. [The road to hell is paved with good intentions.] She reveals the essence of Boomerness: they tried to liberate us, and instead of freedom they left behind chaos.

Bill Clinton

“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: prepare to squirm and shake your increasingly arthritic little fists, for here comes essayist Helen Andrews

“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

'Boomers' is an essential book for our woebegotten time. Excuse me, folks, while I kiss the sky (from the song “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix; born in 1942, he's no Boomer, but it is not The Greatest Generation [Hendrix's] that loved his wild music, it is the Boomers)

“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

Conservatives will rally to Andrews’s caustic appraisal of the culture wars; liberals need not apply.—Publishers Weekly

Andrews hopes to dismantle any remaining belief in the boomers’ self-mythologizing as a generation of emancipated rebels

"Andrews similarly hopes to dismantle any remaining belief in the boomers’ self-mythologizing as a generation of emancipated rebels."—Adam Morris

Boomers cobbled together the brakeless clown car in which we now all must ride, and dumped the rest of us into it, after picking our pockets and stripping every shred of our dignity

". . . a boomer is a member of the worst generation in American history, and perhaps the worst generation in human history. The boomers, handed a wonderful, successful, stable society, fed it into a woodchipper, starting the very instant they could have any influence on society. They cobbled together the brakeless clown car in which we now all must ride, and dumped the rest of us into it, after picking our pockets and stripping every shred of our dignity. And now the author of this excellent book, Helen Andrews, who is not a boomer, expertly analyzes this decline and ongoing fall, through profiles of six boomers, each an exemplar (but not exemplary). . . . [boomers] ate the seed corn that should have fueled Generation X’s success. But at least we came of age before the boomers truly ruined everything for the Millennials and later generations . . . the boomers destroyed the fabric of society. They demanded rights, and rejected responsibilities. They destroyed families" (Source: Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (Helen Andrews), Charles Haywood, Medium)

Boomers dumped us into their clown car after picking our pockets and stripping every shred of our dignity

Woodchipper

"Before they came along, according to Andrews, America was rich, democratic, unified, pious, and optimistic about the future; now, we are a divided nation of lonely, indebted, TV-and-pornography-addled depressives, so brainwashed by self-serving boomer propaganda that we can barely comprehend the enormity of what has been done to us. Perhaps worst of all, the boomers themselves don’t understand what they’ve done — they still think of themselves as heroes who rode in on white horses. Andrews would like to correct the record before they die." (Source: Ok, boomers, the editors)

Perhaps worst of all, the boomers themselves don’t understand what they’ve done — they still think of themselves as heroes who rode in on white horses. Andrews would like to correct the record before they die

"[Boomers] inherited prosperity, social cohesion and functioning institutions. They passed on debt, inequality, moribund churches, and a broken democracy….The boomers should not be allowed to shuffle off the world stage until they have been made to regret their failures."—Helen Andrews

“The boomers were dealt an uncommonly good hand, which makes it truly incredible that they should have screwed up so badly.”—Helen Andrews

Boomers passed on debt, inequality, moribund churches, and a broken democracy in chains ruled by corrupt oligarchs who prefer Marxist socialism

The boomers, as Andrews makes exquisitely clear, are/were not the heroic hippy rebels they've told us they were. They were spoiled children in adult bodies "doing their thing" regardless of consequences, and secretly hoping that there are adults nearby who will take it upon themselves to clean up their messes. Andrews' very capable analyses—in Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster—catches them with their hands in the cookie jar and takes them to task over it as if she were a strict aunt refusing to take any guff.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions

It is important to notice that the liberals have continuously gifted the U.S. with programs that have wonderful intentions but bad to terrible results. It is more than just that they seem sociopathically unwilling and unable to take responsibility for their actions and their consequences. They seem sociopathically offended when they are shown the error of their ways, refusing to admit the errors or undo their missteps and miscalculations. Spoiled much?

This is how a PC liberal 'debates'—she just discovered that there is someone who disagrees with her; a child would merely have a tantrum, but a PC liberal will psychopathically attempt to destroy those who disagree

This liberal stubbornness is more than just "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." It has metastasized into these "woke" liberals being so sure they are "right" that they not only refuse to debate their ideas, they now willingly cancel, dox, smear and even attack anyone who refuses to agree with them. These self-righteous, vengeful, hateful beings are people who obviously slept through civics class and have absolutely no idea what is in our Consitution or what it—and the freedom of speech contained therein—means, and why it is critically important to every patriotic American in the USA. Therefore they opt for Marxist socialism!

This 'woke' liberal is attacking a poor fellow who refused to agree with her—this psychopathic reaction does not bode well for a nation infested with millions of 'woke' liberals!

Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative. Previously, she was the managing editor of the Washington Examiner magazine and a 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, First Things, Claremont Review of Books, The Hedgehog Review, American Affairs, and National Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.

A very insightful review by City Journal: "Andrews spurns a more predictable narrative of protests, riots, and crazy antics in favor of six essay portraits of men and women, each representing “some aspect of the boomer tragedy.” But Andrews has a clear set of criticisms about the boomers well served by these particular notables. In a nutshell, the boomer generation accomplished the “most dramatic sundering of Western civilization since the Protestant Reformation.”

The boomer generation accomplished the most dramatic sundering of Western civilization since the Protestant Reformation

"Boomer market power gave rise to a popular culture that devoured both the high and folk culture of the past. The church, the family, a grounded political establishment, the humanities canon, and personal restraint all crumbled into barely recognizable wreckage. The boomers deluded themselves into thinking that they were acting for the good of mankind; in fact, they were sure of it. Andrews’ book is a cri de coeur from children left behind in the ruins, telling their parents that their idealism was a sham.

While Steve Jobs' tear-it-all-down peers were getting high, he built one of the most successful businesses in American history

"Her first subject, Steve Jobs, nicely illustrates her theme. . . . Of course, that outline fails to capture the genius of the Apple founder who married boomer rebellion and corporate ambition. His genuinely amazing products were more like inventions than mere merchandise. But he also understood exactly how to flatter the self-image of his increasingly affluent customer base. “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers,” went that famous 1997 “Think Different” ad. . . . Hordes of these “misfits” shelled out $1,200 to buy their iMacs. Andrews respects Jobs as a maker, not a taker; while his tear-it-all-down peers were getting high, he built one of the most successful businesses in American history." (Source: We Didn’t Start the Fire, Kay S. Hymowitz, City-Journal)