Boom and Gloom

My reading year in 2020 began with Christopher Caldwell’s brilliant book The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties, and ended with Helen Andrews’s equally impressive Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. There was a lovely symmetry about this chance pairing, since the two histories have in common a magisterial contempt for the self-celebratory media narrative—which has now also become the official culture’s historical narrative—about the period they cover. That is, of course, the now legendary 1960s and the political and cultural legacy that those, like me, who came of age in that decade have carried forward into the present and are now on the point of bequeathing to their Gen-X and Millennial successors. To those, like me, who have long chafed under the constraints of that now-antiquated narrative, both books convey a sense of liberation as well as new understanding.