Book: The Baby Boom

Overview
P. J. O'Rourke's The Baby Boom is a fast-moving, satirical chronicle of America's postwar generation, told by a card-carrying boomer who alternates between confession and cross-examination. He sketches how the cohort born between 1946 and 1964 swelled schools, suburbs, markets, and politics, and how their tastes, fears, and enthusiasms distorted everything they touched. Part memoir, part social history, the book mixes cartoonish exaggeration with affectionate detail to argue that the boomers made the modern American landscape at once freer, richer, sillier, and more self-absorbed.

Childhood and Formation
O'Rourke begins with the padded, expansive 1950s: a nation flush with postwar prosperity, a housing boom, and a flood of new gadgets and entertainments. He recalls the wide latitude of boomer childhoods, unsupervised play, bikes without helmets, TV that raised as many kids as parents did. Suburbia becomes both stage and engine: cookie-cutter homes, new schools, and car culture shape a generation that takes convenience and novelty as birthrights. The Cold War provides a backdrop of absurdity and dread, from duck-and-cover drills to the Space Race, while mass culture, rock 'n' roll, comic books, and later color TV, forms a common soundtrack.

Rebellion, Experiment, and Retreat
As the cohort comes of age, O'Rourke narrates the familiar arc from earnest idealism to indulgent experiment. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, and campus protests galvanize an older tranche of boomers, while younger siblings absorb the theatrics more than the stakes. He dives into the era's reckless freedoms, sex, drugs, communes, and countercultural fashions, presenting them with rueful humor as both liberation and spectacle. The movement era curdles into the 1970s, when disillusion and self-help replace grand causes, and then into the 1980s and 1990s, when many boomers pivot to careers, mortgages, and brand-name consumption without entirely abandoning the rhetoric of rebellion. He draws distinctions within the generation, older boomers who faced the draft versus younger ones who grew up in its wake, arguing that the myth of a single, unified boomer experience is itself a boomer invention.

Impact and Contradictions
The heart of the book is an audit of boomer consequences. O'Rourke credits the generation with broadening personal freedoms and enlarging the sphere of choice, from gender roles to lifestyle, while also lampooning the narcissism and credulity that accompanied that expansion. The boomers' demographic heft created a python bulge moving through institutions: when they were kids, schools exploded; when they were young adults, campuses and job markets transformed; as they aged, politics reorganized around entitlements, healthcare, and security. He blames the generation for turning parenting into a profession, for spending with abandon while deferring costs, and for exporting culture wars into every corner of public life. Yet he also notes that much of the era's prosperity, creativity, and social reform happened because this many people demanded more out of life than their parents thought prudent.

Voice, Method, and Final Notes
The book is a collage of riffs, set pieces, and autobiographical vignettes rather than a footnoted survey. O'Rourke's libertarian skepticism keeps him equal-opportunity in his mockery, skewering both left-wing pieties and right-wing sanctimony, while preserving a kind of battered affection for his peers. The jokes soften a hard thesis: the boomers improved almost everything they touched and made much of it worse, often at the same time. He closes by pondering a generation entering old age with the same determination to be noticed that marked its youth, predicting that its final legacy will be to demand novelty even from decline. The subtitle’s promise, "It Wasn't My Fault" and "I'll Never Do It Again", lands as a punchline and a confession, capturing a cohort’s impulse to rationalize, apologize, and keep talking as history catches up.