BOOM! - A Different View

Book Review by Richard Frisbie

The author is a recalcitrant and fiercely independent product of the sixties who thanks Mr. Brokaw for the wake-up call.

    To give you an idea of what BOOM! is about, here’s a quote from the jacket:
“A virtual reunion of ‘the class of ‘68,’ offering wise and moving reflections and frank personal remembrances about people’s lives during a time of high ideals and profound social, political, and individual change.” Reading Boom! forced me to revisit the 60s and come to grips with my life as I, and the decade, shaped it.

    Originally I expected a book of photographs of musicians, flower children, drugged-out concert scenes and other psychedelia, so finding BOOM! a heavy tome with a few pages of black and white photos disappointed me at first. What is the fun of rehashing a visual decade if you can’t see it? Then, as I started to read it I resented a structural convention, the insertion of BOOM! after every paragraph. I think I was in a bad mood that day because nothing seemed to please me.

    Eventually, the previously annoying BOOM!s faded into a syncopated rhythm that led me through the introduction in a sixtyish dance (not as an age, but as a movement) until I was sorry they ended. I was well into the first chapter before I even noticed they were gone. By then this book had my attention. BOOM!

    The very conceit that someone who actually lived through the 60s needed to read about it ticked me off, too. It took me awhile to get over that. Gradually I saw that my age-clouded, drug-hazed memory wasn’t as clear as Mr. Brokaw's prose, and eventually his "voice" captivated me. I found myself reliving the 60’s with a clarity and perspective I wish I’d possessed at the time. His writing is wordy but fluid, and his insight into events - ones I experienced as a teenager but he experienced as an adult - gave me a new outlook on the decade that defined my life, and defined the lives of a generation. Now, for better or worse, here we are 40 years later, trying to make sense of the right and wrong turns in our lives, our world, and the people in it. BOOM!

    This book is all about people. Some, whose names we know, like Haldeman and McCarthy, were on Brokaw’s radar long before we knew their names, or what impact they would have on our lives. His early years in television broadcasting were spent in the origins of culture and counter culture - California - where every movement of substance started, and where the rest of the country wanted to be, just a shade north of his LA base in San Francisco, with flowers in our hair. Meanwhile, he was meeting and interviewing the players of the future, the ones who went on to shape our nation.

    BOOM! makes me wish I’d paid more attention in the 60s. A little less hedonism in my life, and the collective lives of my generation, just might have permitted us the clear vision Tom Brokaw and his spokespeople share, admittedly in hindsight, of the positive and negative energies we endured. Civil Rights and women’s rights, Vietnam and assassinations, these were the yin and yang of the decade during which I, and I believe, we, fell into a rabbit-hole while contemplating our navels, only to emerge into the shambles of the new millennium, into a world created by our narcissism.

    We also hear from some people we don’t know, such as Woody Miller, father of Olympic skier Bode Miller, who says it better, “I don’t think it was drugs that affected people the wrong way. I think society got corrupted by people wanting more material things.” Our whole lives, nation, and world summed up so succinctly in two simple sentences. That’s the kind of people Tom Brokaw presents in BOOM!
 
    This book is filled with pictures you can’t see, music you can’t hear, and mistakes you can’t escape. For better or worse, Tom Brokaw’s book BOOM! defines the decade, brackets it and finally lays it to rest. Read it so you can too. Then, we have a choice. We can put some old Morrison LPs on the turntable, bake some hash brownies and live selfish lives into our dotage, probably causing him to write the sequel, “The Worst Generation.” Or, we can get off our more than ample behinds (just when did that happen, anyway?) and begin raising the children and grandchildren of our generation on the ideals we originally aspired to. Then, maybe, just maybe, we’ll finally understand “what a long strange trip it’s been!”