Small Business Boomers

Tom Brokaw’s new book, BOOM! I’d say BUST!

by Jean on December 7th, 2007

Since this blog is directed to/about Baby Boomers, I suppose one of us (Jim or me) needs to write about Tom Brokaw’s new book, titled BOOM! I am not sure why I’m reluctant to write about it; maybe it’s because I had high expectations which weren’t really fulfilled.

As an “early” boomer, I was disappointed to see that Brokaw’s subject was really the Sixties, not the entire Boom period or the Boomers in general. A bit of “bait and switch” there, in my opinion, although the subtitle is “Voices of the Sixties.” More specifically, Brokaw focuses on the time from 1963 and JFK’s assassination to 1974 and Nixon’s resignation. The organization style is topical; that is, he writes about Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement, the Women’s Rights Movement.

The book is written as much about Tom Brokaw and his career and family as it is about the people who lived through that period. He did have some good stories about some of the people who lived through that era and are still around, people like Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Berry Gordy, Tommy Smothers, Jane Pauley and Gary Trudeau, Gloria Steinem, Jann Wenner, and political figures like Hillary Clinton and Dick Cheney. I didn’t know, for example, that Kris Kristoffersen was a helicopter pilot and a Rhodes scholar. And I enjoyed the “then and now” photos.

My disappointment comes, I guess, from the fact that he wrote about the events of the 60’s as if no one alive had any memory of them. The parts which discussed events came across like history lessons; his descriptions of the women’s movement, for example, sounded like a high school textbook. He focused on some events, which is certainly his right, but other pivotal events were almost ignored. The Kent State shootings, for example, were given only a brief mention. I happened to be a grad student at Kent State and was on campus that day. I never realized what was going on; it was then and is now a very large campus.

I would suggest that you try listening to the book on Audible or CD; a friend listened to it that way and said it was enjoyable. As for me, I’ll pass.

Share This

Related Stories

• Learning from the sub-prime and dot com busts
• Teach Your Children…About Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Housing Bust and Retail Real Estate
• Are you worried about the “credit crunch”?
• 3 Things to note

POSTED IN: Being A Boomer, Boomer Talk