Call me narrow-minded, but I didn’t think the baby boomer generation – those currently in their mid-fifties and mid-sixties – were BBC Radio 6’s target audience.
Probably a good thing, I thought while listening yesterday to Ali Catterall review Francis Beckett’s What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? on Nemone’s Tuesday Book Club. After all, who wants to hear some home truths about how your generation lived the dream but then failed the future, created a society worse than the one you inherited, and thereby betrayed both earlier and later generations?
But apparently the baby boomers aren’t averse to a bit of critical self-reflection – Catterall explains that Beckett’s latest book is part of a contemporary literary trend of baby boomers ‘flagellating themselves’ over their mistakes and sending the warning: ‘never trust the hippies, especially us’.
Fanning the flames of an intergenerational war, Beckett’s chronicle of how the baby boomers ‘destroyed their inheritance, and declined to show the same benevolence to the next generation as was shown to them’ is a call-to-arms for BBC Radio 6’s listeners: the baby boomers’ children and grandchildren. Beckett’s message to them – stylishly and succinctly put – is clear: your parents have a lot to answer for.
What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? by Francis Beckett is available here, priced £12.99