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| A GENERATION OF SOCIOPATHS How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America Bruce Cannon Gibney New York: Hachette Books, April 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-316-39578-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-316-39578-1 | 430pp. | HC | $27.00 | |
| Page xvi: | "Even a plague of generational locusts like the Boomers can only do so much damage in a lifetime, however unduly prolonged that lifetime may be courtesy of benefits funded by the young." |
| I question the loaded language and especially the assumption that Boomers don't deserve their life expectancy. |
| Page xvii: | "In the week this book went to press, the electorate decided and Boomers provided the critical votes. But essentially nothing written here had to change—the sheer inertia of Boomerism guaranteed some sort of fiasco would unfold at every level, whether it was Madam or Mister President on January 20th." |
| Drastically overstated; assumes no difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton. |
| Page xxiv: | "The future would soon be reposed in the hands of a group altogether less competent and well-meaning." |
| "Be reposed"? |
| Page xxiv: | "...reducing the 324-odd million stories of the American people into comprehensible summaries and simple charts." |
| Word order, punctuation: S/B "the 324-million-odd stories". |
| Page 1: | "Exactly when Flaubert caught the pox was unclear—he definitely had it by twenty-eight, after a sojurn to the fleshpots of Beirut—but..." |
| Spelling: S/B "sojourn". |
| Page 28: | "...despite its considerable moral compromises, ranging from the indiscriminate bombing of civilian centers to the reduction of American citizens to internment camps" |
| Word choice: S/B "relocation". |
| Page 49: | "What about the protest movement, which had previously effected such sympathy for the Vietnamese?" |
| Word choice: S/B "affected" — in the sense of "pretended to have." (Although this could arguably have been intended as "brought about", in which case it would be correct. But that seems an improbably anachronistic usage.) |
| Page 52: | "The Right's counterculture gets forgotten, paradoxically because it achieved greater success becoming not so much a counterculture as the culture..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "success, becoming". |
| Page 54: | "Offense was certainly a substantial part of the point and if Êpartier le bourgeousie! was the rallying cry, then on only those grounds did communal experiments succeed." |
| Pretentious use of uncommon French phrase. |
| Page 57: | "Given what was happening in the drive-ins and theatre seats, all this was less avant la letre than après." |
| Pretentious use of uncommon French phrase. |
| Page 63: | "Not many divorcees are sociopaths, but a great many sociopaths are divorced." |
| This is doubtless true, but it rather undercuts his thesis that Boomer sociopathy is currently the major cause of divorce. |
| Page 72: | "Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the story of the past forty years has been the substitution of sentiment for science, of fact for feelings." |
| Word order: S/B "feelings for fact[s]". |
| Page 73: | "For the Boomer, La verité, c'est moi." |
| Pretentious use of uncommon French phrase (although probably most would understand its meaning.) |
| Page 74: | "La Tour Eiffel was monument with a revealing duality of purpose..." |
| Missing article: S/B "was a monument". |
| Page 97: | "The Seventies' combination of slow growth and high inflation were held by conventional models to be impossible..." |
| Number error: S/B "was". |
| Page 103: | "However, a large body of work [***] shows that humans are not wholly rational agents, that we are susceptible to numerous cognitive biases that drive our thinking away from the traditional idea." |
| Word choice: S/B "ideal". |
| Page 106: | "The Senator's message didn't resonate, at least, not with most of the electorate..." |
| Extra comma: S/B "at least not". |
| Page 148: | "The income/contribution limits of such accounts means that it's the Boomer middle class..." |
| Number error: S/B "mean". |
| Page 174: | "A large minority of bankruptcies come from catastrophic health-care costs, and some of these can (and, as an accounting matter, are) just written off as bad luck." |
| Missing word: S/B "can be". |
| Page 181: | "The federal gas tax is 18.4 cents plus a (volume-weighted) average 26.59 cents at the state level, for a total of 44.99 cents per gallon as of 2015." |
| Punctuation, missing word: S/B "cents, plus a volume-weighted average of". |
| Page 230: | "The campaign against welfare had been long underway, especially after Ronald Reagan fixated on the case of Linda Taylor..." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 252: | "The biodiesel Mercedes that formerly trundled around Boomer Berkeley were a farce, and so were many equivalents peddled by a dim or cynical establishment (e.g. fuel cells—remember those? switchgrass? ethanol?)" |
| Overstated: fuel cells are not inherently useless, just not sufficiently developed. The same goes for ethanol, so long as it's not derived from corn or other food crops. |
| Page 256: | "Machines already stock warehouses [***] and robotization is underway with longshoremen and other traditionally well-paying blue-collar jobs." |
| Missing space: S/B "under way". |
| Page 261: | "The correspondence between Boomer test-taking and falling scores is suggestive, as it is what happened next." |
| Extra word: S/B "as is". |
| Page 268: | "The murky, misguided, sentimental, and fraudulent nature of Boomer educational goals more or less guarantee bizarre outcomes." |
| Number error: S/B "guarantees". |
| Page 269: | "Boomer-run schools cannot be complicit in confirming displeasing realities, like the fact that not all children can, want, or should go to college." |
| Missing word: S/B "want to". |
| Page 298: | "In the land of endless choice, you may select from many different brews, but not many different brewers." |
| The author seems to have missed the microbrew revolution. He should visit Whole Foods (or indeed most any Silicon Valley supermarket) and view the selection in the coolers. For the ultimate in "endless choice," there is BevMo. |
| Page 327: | "The mechanisms of a national, sociopathic agenda subverts Tolstoy: each family can now be unhappy in the same way." |
| Number error: S/B "subvert". |
| Page 335: | "...that means the highest nominal federal rates might rise to around 50 percent (from 39.6 percent, though the effective rates would be much lower)." |
| Misplaced parenthesis: S/B "(from 39.6 percent), though the effective rates would be much lower". |
| Page 339: | "The vast majority of the electorate (up to 87 percent) views themselves as some sort of 'middle class' and therefore interprets any proposed breaks to be in their immediate self-interest". |
| Number errors: S/B "itself" and "its". |
| Page 340: | "Cash-based compensation, like tips and so on, frequently go unreported." |
| Number error: S/B "goes". (Also, why "cash-based" rather than "cash"?) |
| Page 340fn: | "An exodus of the rich did not occur in the 1940s and 1950s, when the highest marginal rates were 90+ percent, though the midcentury did not have a generation of tax-dodging sociopaths." |
| If this is correct throughout, I don't understand the point. I think the second instance should be "did". |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.