Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I am regretting buying this book. I am sympathetic to its central argument, and yet...it doesn’t matter how many times the author cites a stat and then correlates it to the birth year of the person involved, I wind up unconvinced. The book is myopic - it starts with a premise and then looks for data to back it up. That’s not how an argument is built. I am struggling to get through it as a result. It’s tendentious rather than insightful, and I couldn't help but wonder as I tried to get through it, whether there are cross-generational characteristics at play. In the 60’s, the democratic and republican party ideologies and core constituencies flipped, echoing positions formed in the Civil War. Is that more of a causal mechanism to the dysfunction we’re seeing now? The author makes it sound like all our problems go away when boomers start dying out. I don’t think it’s that simple. In fact, I know it’s not. Yes, the boomers do seem collectively sociopathic, but going back to the Civil War for a second... This is a country whose prosperity was founded in many ways on enslaving other humans while waxing poetic about enlightenment ideals of equality. It was a country founded by anti-monarchists who thought nothing of claiming a continent from current inhabitants to install themselves as non-royal landed gentry. It is a country that tossed its constitution out the window in the Second World War out of fear of an ethnic minority. It is a country that almost came apart at the seams due to greed less than a century ago. From that standpoint, the boomers are not fundamentally different from generations prior or next, and our problems don’t end when the last boomer dies.