My Generation by Michael Gross (2000, Hardcover, Illustrated)

Far from being stuck in the 1960s, a decade when half its members were still children, the Baby Boom has not only continually transformed itself but has also brought epic change in society. My Generation is the collective biography of the millions of Americans born between Pearl Harbor Day in 1941 and the 1963 assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Here are nineteen quintessential boomers, ranging from the admired to the notorious, from the expected--a Vietnam War hero, an antiwar activist, an LSD chemist, an author of the Macintosh computer graphic user interface, a spiritual celebrity--to the less-so--a Jesus freak turned Queer Theorist, an ultraconservative congressman, a billionaire builder, a hip-hop impresario, and the Studio 54-bred AIDS activist who inspired Broadway's Rent. Through their stories and his own, Michael Gross takes us on the wild ride from Yasgur's Farm to Silicon Valley and into the twenty-first century.

My Generation puts the tumultous history of the baby boomers in context and makes sense out of the storm. The compelling narrative brings to life all the defining moments--the civil rights, antiwar, and identity struggles, the highs and lows of drugs and the sexual revolution, retreat and rentrenchment, the rediscovery of faith, the rise of conservatism. The book ends with the cyber revolution, the Boom's best expression of itself, and the reign of First boomers, Bill and Hillary Clinton, who, a surprising number of their age peers think, represent them at their very worst.

For half a century, for good and ill, baby boomers have been the most powerful generation in the most powerful nation on earth. This remarkable book is a chronicle of its conflicts and its achievements, the unprecedented changes it caused, the brilliant hopes of its early days, the awful traumas of its adolescence, and how it has struggled ever since to make good on its unfulfilled promise.