Boomer Bible

From Publishers Weekly
The Boomers of management consultant Laird's title are baby boomers, and the author systematically skewers all of the things he claims that generation holds sacred--television, Wall Street avarice, the heroes of our nation's history and our Eurocentric cultural heritage. Boomers have forsaken established religions to follow Harry, the First Babe of the Boom, who gives them great things to eat, drink and inhale and who proclaims for them total exemption from responsibility for their actions. This "bible" also includes "The Book of the Damn Yankees," a version of American history, and the "Psongs" ("Happy is the man who gets to walk around with a pocketful of cash"). All of these topics have been treated better before. The book's pseudo-biblical style can be amusing at first, but it wears thin long before the end of the volume's 700-plus pages. The author is capable of an insightful observation or a genuinely funny line, but these are few and far between. And with his hipper-than-thou attitude, Laird seems to despise everyone but himself, while his muddled politics, neither left nor right, seem designed to confuse and deliberately offend readers. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Meg Cox, The Wall Street Journal
And then there is The Boomer Bible, a sprawling, wickedly funny modern rewriting of the Bible that's meant to sum up a generation.


Book Description
In the beginning there was the Holy Bible
2 Which was a very good book indeed, but so many things happened since the beginning,
3 That Maybe it was time for another bible,
4 So a punk from Philadelphia wrote a new one,
5 And so it is called The Boomer Bible,
6 So there.
7 And Its Past Testament tells the history of the world, including the Book of Greeks, Book of Brits, Book of Yanks, Book of Russkies, and all the other self-proclaimed Chosen Nations,
8 And people sticking each other with pointed sticks, and acting up, which is called civilization,
9 And also about religion and art and movies and literature, and TV, and so forth, which is why there are also the Books of Pnowlege,
10 Including Psongs, Psayings, and Psomethings,
11 Written just like the other Bible but without any big unpronounceable words,
12 So that you and I might truly understand it,
13 For a change.
14 And Its Present Testament tells about the coming of Harry, and The Way of Harry,
15 Who may be the messiah everybody has been waiting for,
16 Unless he really isn't,
17 Which is hard to say,
18 So there.
19 And there is also The Book of Harrier Brayer together with the Harrier Hymnal,
20 And another Testament too,
21 And Concordance, and a lenticular hand on the cover.
22 And It is not for the faint of heart,
23 Or the easily offended,
24 Or the priggish or the prudish,
25 But who cares,
26 Because neither was Candide, or Swift's A Modest Proposal, or Rabelais, or Lenny Bruce
28 Or all the other satires and satirists who felt the need to warn us when we have gone astray,
29 Which we have,
29 Which you'll know all about,
31 If you read your Boomer Bible,
32 Or there.

Over 87,000 copies in print.


From the Back Cover
"A sprawling, wickedly funny modern rewriting of the Bible that's meant to sum up a generation." -The Wall Street Journal Only once in ten years, if we're very lucky, does a book like The Boomer Bible come along. It's the kind of book that makes you laugh, makes you angry, makes you question, makes you cringe, makes you think and shout yes! in agreement. It's the kind of book that thoroughly defines its times. Without heresy or sacrilege, R.F. Laird has appropriated the most popular format in the history of Western letters to examine the beliefs and values we live by, and everything that went into forming them-from literature to psychoanalysis, from religion to relativity to TV. He captures the conflict of the Boomer era-growing up with the Ten Commandments, the Four Gospels, and the Golden Rule, and coming of age in the era of sex, drugs, and gimme gimme gimme. And he tells lots of great jokes-the kinds of jokes Lenny Bruce might have told, or Mark Twain, or Jonathan Smith, or Rabelais or Aristophanes. The Boomer Bible is a dazzling invention, a darkly comic and devastating mirror of our age. Look into it, and see how far we've come-and gone astray.


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The Boomers of management consultant Laird's title are baby boomers, and the author systematically skewers all of the things he claims that generation holds sacred--television, Wall Street avarice, the heroes of our nation's history and our Eurocentric cultural heritage. Boomers have forsaken established religions to follow Harry, the First Babe of the Boom, who gives them great things to eat, drink and inhale and who proclaims for them total exemption from responsibility for their actions. This ``bible'' also includes ``The Book of the Damn Yankees,'' a version of American history, and the ``Psongs'' (``Happy is the man who gets to walk around with a pocketful of cash''). All of these topics have been treated better before. The book's pseudo-biblical style can be amusing at first, but it wears thin long before the end of the volume's 700-plus pages. The author is capable of an insightful observation or a genuinely funny line, but these are few and far between. And with his hipper-than-thou attitude, Laird seems to despise everyone but himself, while his muddled politics, neither left nor right, seem designed to confuse and deliberately offend readers. (Oct.)


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