Balsamic Dreams

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
For anyone who has had enough of Eastern mysticism, dinner-party discussions of the provenance of your neighbor's balsamic vinegar, politically correct or trendy euphemism, or the '60s and the generation that made it the defining era of their lives, Joe Queenan is "on the same page." In Balsamic Dreams, Queenan finds a new target for the poison pen that made Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon a bestselling success: himself, and his unfortunate peers, the Baby Boomer generation.

With his caustic, ironic, and sardonic wit, Queenan delivers a sweeping overview of the Baby Boomers, whom he calls "the most obnoxious people in the history of the human race." In short profile, their general characteristics include "epic self-absorption, staggering greed, a fiendish obsession with staying young, generally dreadful hair"; they speak in "a virulent brand of euphemism," including terms and expressions like "hubris," "mentoring," and "vertical integration"; they suffer from having "never devised an exit strategy from their youth." But as Queenan says, "The single most damning, and obvious criticism that can be leveled at Baby Boomers is, of course, that they promised they wouldn't sell out and become fiercely materialistic like their parents, and then they did. They further complicated matters by mulishly spending their entire adult lives trying to persuade themselves and everybody else that they had not in fact sold out, that they had merely matured and grown wiser.... They had not been the first generation to sell out, but they were the first generation to sell out and then insist that they hadn't."

From their cultish obsession with menus and their ingredients to how they "parent" their children, Queenan delivers an unforgiving profile and history of his generation, including a "Test to Determine if You Are a Baby Boomer," for those who aren't quite sure. He also looks to the past and the future, to compare Boomers with their parents, the "Greatest Generation" (taking a few stabs at Tom Brokaw while he's at it, asking, "If the Greatest Generation was so great, how come they raised horrible children like the Baby Boomers?"), and takes into account the opinion of the Boomers' children, the Gen Xers ("Without exception, they wished we would all die"). He also provides a historical timeline marking "Ten Days That Rocked the World," or, "the pivotal moments in Baby Boomer history where things went awry."

Even if you are not a Baby Boomer, Balsamic Dreams is a hilarious look at the generation that brought you marjoram, box sets, and 50 different varieties of coffee. And if you think Queenan's history is something you don't need to know, remember, "Baby Boomers now occupy most of the important political, economic, and cultural positions in this society, and represent this great nation on the world stage. Yet for the most part, with their dysfunctional refusal to age gracefully and their concomitant inability to get a fashion clue, the entire generation is embarrassing themselves, their children, their parents, the whole country." Tune in, turn on, tune out -- do whatever you need to do, but you should read this book. (Elise Vogel)

Andrew Johnston

. . . index features entries like 'Ringwald, Molly — America's refusal to deal with sinister legacy of,' . . . you're dealing with a brilliantly sick mind. —Time Out

Bruce McCall

Somewhere, Mencken is beaming. —The New York Times Book Review

Craig Lindsey

Queenan cuts into his targets with all the verbal agility of a literary samurai. —Houston Chronicle

James Elroy

Half-Calvinist, half-nihilist . . . [ he's] outrageously funny.

John Anderson

When Joe Queenan is good, he's very, very good. But when he's bad, he's a whole lot better. —New York Newsday

Michael Lewis

I've laughed till it hurt reading Joe Queenan.

PW

What distinguishes the baby boomers? According to film and social critic Queenan (Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon) in this witty, sardonic and heartfelt paen to his fellow aging boomers, they weren't the first generation to sell out "but they were the first generation to sell out and then insist that they hadn't." Deftly distilling the impact of a wide range of events in popular culture, he cites April 21, 1971, as one of "ten days that rocked the world" for boomers, with the release of Carol King's album Tapestry. Meanwhile, recent films such as What Lies Beneath and The Haunting appeal to boomers, he observes, with the message, "Just because you're dead doesn't mean you can't get your life organized." And, he asks, won't someone "admit that La Vita e Bella is Holocaust-denying crap?" Queenan occasionally belabors his humorous conceits (e.g., he ranks baby boomers as the 267th best generation, "right behind the Carthaginians in 220 B.C."). Yet he can also cut to the quick: "We abandoned the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed [for] postdoctoral work in American Studies.... We made millionaires out of nitwits like Deepak Chopra and Tom Clancy while geniuses starved.

From The Critics

Queenan's latest comic riff is aimed at baby boomers, the author's own demographic, whom he calls "the most obnoxious people in the history of the human race." A mighty accusation, but when the facts are laid bare, the fifty-year-old writer makes a strong case. According to Queenan, the generation that once produced achievements like "the Freedom Riders, Woodstock, Four Dead in Ohio, driving Nixon from office, [and] Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy" somehow ended up "venal, self-obsessed, hypocritical egomaniacs blighted by an insalubrious interest in things like the provenance of their neighbors' balsamic vinegar." Alas, he laments, it did not have to be this way. Their Waterloo came on April 21, 1971, he says—the day Carole King's Tapestry was released. After that, baby boomers as a group began to embody that album's three overriding themes: "genteel lameness, communal nostalgia for the extremely recent past and incessant and incorrigible self-repackaging." It has been downhill ever since. This is a hilarious look at America's ungracefully aging forty- and fiftysomethings: Queenan pokes fun at baby boomers' every absurd lifestyle obsession and embarrassing lapse of taste—including Andrea Bocelli and Riverdance.
—Eric Wargo

(Excerpted Review)

Publishers Weekly

What distinguishes the baby boomers? According to film and social critic Queenan (Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon) in this witty, sardonic and heartfelt paen to his fellow aging boomers, they weren't the first generation to sell out "but they were the first generation to sell out and then insist that they hadn't." Deftly distilling the impact of a wide range of events in popular culture, he cites April 21, 1971, as one of "ten days that rocked the world" for boomers, with the release of Carol King's album Tapestry. Meanwhile, recent films such as What Lies Beneath and The Haunting appeal to boomers, he observes, with the message, "Just because you're dead doesn't mean you can't get your life organized." And, he asks, won't someone "admit that La Vita e Bella is Holocaust-denying crap?" Queenan occasionally belabors his humorous conceits (e.g., he ranks baby boomers as the 267th best generation, "right behind the Carthaginians in 220 B.C."). Yet he can also cut to the quick: "We abandoned the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed [for] postdoctoral work in American Studies.... We made millionaires out of nitwits like Deepak Chopra and Tom Clancy while geniuses starved." (June) Forecasts: Queenan's broad, well-defined audience will eat up this cultural criticism lite. With a 12-city author tour and national print ad campaign timed for Father's Day, this self-proclaimed sellout will sell big. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

This short and snappy book is a kind of poison-pen letter to the generation known as baby boomers, "that stupendously large, spectacularly visible group of people who were born between 1943 and 1960," otherwise known as the "venal, self-obsessed, hypocritical egomaniacs blighted by an insalubrious interest in things like the provenance of their neighbors' balsamic vinegar." Queenan, who writes a column for the New York Times and is a contributing editor at GQ, dissects these ephemeral creatures as delicately as an entomologist examining the inner workings of a mayfly. He lays bare their failings, foibles, fatuities, flaws, and fads with a keen and unsentimental knife. The pages bristle with caustic wit and deadly parody, and his victims are certain to wince, as the evidence he adduces to demonstrate his contentions is pretty overwhelming. To furnish counterpoint to his shrewdly cutting thrusts, he offers tips to boomers "to ensure that the other generations can get along with us during the difficult times ahead." A fully diverting diversion. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/01.] A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A sardonic, often laugh-out-loud puncturing of Baby Boomer pretensions. Queenan (Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, 2000, etc.) ridicules fellow Boomers not just for selling out but for acting unbearably sanctimonious about doing so. Even as they hurtle toward senescence, they remain "as convinced of their uniqueness as the Bolsheviks, as persuaded of their genius as the Victorians, as self-absorbed as the Romantics, [and] as prosperous as the ancient Romans." Don't look for a well-organized indictment here. Instead, it's best simply to "go with the flow" (to use the generational patois frequently lampooned here) of this Dennis Miller–style rant against the pop-culture detritus of what the author terms, with cheerful lack of restraint, "the most obnoxious people in the history of the human race." Sometimes the irony becomes tiresome, but, more often than not, Queenan hits the mark, particularly in pointing to Boomers' annoying contributions to culture—not only balsamic vinegar but message T-shirts, male ponytails, "tag-team" eulogies, childrearing habits, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and, most hilariously, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen's Experience Music Project in Seattle (a "garish, ludicrous monument that a New Age Ozymandias built to himself"). Still basking in the afterglow of the civil-rights and antiwar movements, Boomers now thrive on retroactive political correctness. Imposing their values on dead historical figures, Queenan suggests, indulges their tendency to "pick a fight they can't possibly lose." In two of the better tongue-in-cheek sections, Queenan acts as historian (identifying the 1971 release of Carole King's Tapestry as the moment that caused the Boomers' downwardspiral) and futurologist (e.g., proposing taxpayer-funded pensions for rock stars so they can stop touring). A scathing dissection of the lamest generation in all their latte-loving vainglory. Author tour