The X-Philes

Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X On the New American Economy
by Meredith Bagby
E.P. Dutton, 1998, 274 pp., $24.95

I have before me a book on the political economy of Generation X that resembles nothing so much as a hundred mediocre freshman compositions strung together end to end. To shoot, briefly, some fish in their barrels: “We have been determined by the negatives and positives of an America era that saw moms transformed into full-time workers, become masters of their own reproductive systems, and engineer elections through platforms they supported . . . We explore. We invent. We question. We go our own way. The plusses of this behavior are legion as we ...