Joe Queenan's "Balsamic Dreams" Review

In the hope of finding a book at a very affordable price that could be read in one sitting, I ended picking up Joe Queenan’s “Balsamic Dreams”. I wasn't enticed by the cover or the friendly title of this book but when I flipped its first few pages and read the inviting lines, I stood myself corrected.

In Balsamic Dreams, Joe Queenan speaks about the Baby boomer generation. The Baby Boom generation is the time when a sharp increase of births after the World War II made into the records of history. In general, the generation started from 1946 to 1964 before Generation X came forth. The book is intended to be an indictment to his own generation as manifested through his writings where he mercilessly turns against the Boomers: “This is what makes the Baby Boomers different: They’re stupefyingly self-centered, unbelievably rude, obnoxious beyond belief, and they’re everywhere. Until the rise of Baby Boomers, America only had to deal with a few thousand geographically spaced people who acted like pigs. Now, it has millions of them. This is the downside of prosperity.” Those lines were written strongly, yet the wit and humor are present, and that’s what makes Queenan’s book a guilty pleasure.

Joe Queenan exposes the darkness of the Baby Boom generation to the light, from self-absorption to unabashed consumerism. He also cited that Baby Boomers are hypocritical, critical, inventive (specially in creating banal words) and they always search for the fountain of youth. Queenan presents interesting short stories to some of the book’s subtopics. Each story centers a particular kind of a Baby Boomer and the things, ideologies and beliefs that are making him a categorized Boomer himself.

As an example of a critical Baby Boomer, I have here a short representation which I will stress from Queenan. Parents that were born as Baby Boomers taught their children to think, act and live like them: A child commented to the owner of a restaurant about a mounted deer’s head hanging on the wall. The child thought that it was disgusting and after giving the owner a nasty commentary she left with her proud parents who knew that their child was wise beyond her age. See? The way baby boomers teach their children to be critical is also a part of self-absorption. It implies that to be called a good parent one must teach his child the things that are ought to be self- discovered as the child gradually grows.

Another thing that I learned about Baby Boomers is that they were mostly the inventors of today’s banalities. We may have heard the word ‘sanitary engineers’ and yes, you’re right it’s the other technical term for ‘janitors’ or ‘garbage men.’ They have also invented the words ‘edgy’, ‘ Out of control’, ‘Do the math’, etc. They became the gods and goddesses of euphemisms.

He also stresses out that the Baby Boomers are always complaining about the dumbing down of American civilization, but for the most part, it is the Baby Boomers who did the dumbing down. They made the fatal mistake of confusing pop culture with real culture and mistaking lifestyle for life. They also preached that “Small is beautiful.” But at the back of their minds, they always craved for big things and they wanted things to be big. These are examples of Baby Boomer hypocrisy.

Here’s the irony of the book, there are a couple of problems that I encountered upon reading it. First, there are many repetitions. As an example, he elucidates the high points of the sixties generation such as “the Freedom Riders, Woodstock, Four Dead in Ohio, driving Nixon from office, Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy” verbatim many times. There were also some words which are repeated numerously and of which I lost count.

Second, he has written a series of interconnected essays rather than one sustained indictment. This makes his work distracting due to disorganization of thoughts and frequent using of difficult words which need greater comprehension or even a dictionary to avoid what we always banter as ‘nose bleeding’. He fails to develop his observations of the characters in his stories into a unified and coherent objection.

The other problem is that he is all out ideological and stylistic in his writing rather than structural which will often leave the readers hanging and waiting for a direct term or a follow-up explanation of what he has been trying to imply.

This book, as what the author calls as a short history, gives us the glimpse of the so-called Greatest Generation or the Gen-X which followed after the BB generation , why and how they have brought shame to their countries. Now, we are sure of when was the time, our modern stereotyped generation came from. I can say that today’s generation is the descendant of the Baby Boomers.

Queenan’s book was funny if only readers could comprehend everything he wanted to state. From his book, we would be able to trace back some of the [irritating] traits that we are practicing nowadays. Thanks to Queenan, we won’t be blaming ourselves for having the lifestyle that we have today. Blame the baby boomers.