Well I finally found it, the book I am reviewing here, and I was utterly riled up and alternately turned to pallor by what I saw. _Millennials Rising_ by William Strauss and Neil Howe is a terrible new book with the authors' own attitudes and tones clearly creeping in. Central is the statement that teens today, utterly different from Generation X who apparently are no longer teens, want modesty. Several other virtues and vices, such as being group-minded and team-working, as well as conservative, heart-of-the-community citizens who deeply trust their government, being optimistic and totally trusting in politics and the system despite mountains of corruption, are mentioned throughout, with the same remarks that teens are so well-behaved being repeated a hundred times each in this book, the same things being said over and over again.

While _Milennials Rising_ repeated page after page that we insist upon some concept of "good conduct" taken from the 1940s, I didn't believe a word of it. The apparent lesson of the book is that most teens want to return to traditional values now because they realize the decay of civic life and "institutions". Right. Anyone can take a small minority of the population and make it sound like the norm if you look at only a few kids. To put together this book they found a few teens who believe that "The best way for me to rebel is for me to dress formally all the time . . . respect my elders, and love my country . . .". Or a teen who wrote "the kid with orange hair and a tongue piercing. what a joke. for attention and that is all they do it for, not for self expression. any parent who would allow that form of self-mutilation should be charged with abuse not being a cool parent." Kids like that would get made into a fight if they said that at my school.

These Boomer men who aren't even marketers shouldn't have been allowed to speak about what's considered cool and uncool among teen circles; they get this one study of what sales of brands have gone up and down in the past few years and decide that the rise of Old Navy and Adidas or the decline of Levi's and SEGA is further evidence that teens are some kind of pre-retro anti-Xers. Why don't they mention, say, the recent rise of Arizona Jeans or all these other things that sound closer to X. They take it from only a few kids and say that most of us have these tastes in music and fashion. The tastes of one little subgroup. If I said the skaters represented a fat majority of today's teens, that would never be true, and I'd knock out everyone else with their styles as typical. They report on the Fallon-Elligott marketing group with its determination that teens fell into eight categories and called it "a nastier update of the old VALS typology". That it's only meant to "wrap around the image of kids as ueber-Xers". Doesn't it occur to them that maybe they find teens falling into those groups because we ARE sort of like X? Another quot they stick in reports "Business Week did a marketing piece on the new generation. . . . All the Boomer marketers who pick up this piece are going to get a really telling description of late-wave Xers-then try to apply that knowledge to Millennials and completely flop". If the Business Week editors actually study real kids, did it ever occur to them that these kids really ARE like late Xers (however late "late Xers are", although I assume it's shortly before 1981 from the authors' dates), and it isn't going to fail just because their ideas about teens say it will? I can't see any differences between the set born in 1978 and the set born in 1984 myself. Even the authors themselves mention commerce like Delia's that works successfully with a Generation-X flair. _Millennials Rising_ provides evidence that teens come from a new, wanted generation because starting in 1982 movies show angelic babies and children instead of the "Rosemary's Baby" and "Exorcist" and all those evil baby movies before. This, they say, represents a change in societal attitudes towards children that's supposed to stick with them now as teens, but they say that gross movies like "American Pie" that feature teens only show Generation X's humor and as movies don't reflect reality. Movies are a good gauge of generations and reality when it helps support their claim, and yet they aren't when they go against their notion of what teens are like. Make up your minds! Also, as teenagers we're certainly not treated as cuddly as we were as children back then. They try to spread butter on movie and TV teens as much as possible, painting "Dawson's Creek" youth as clean-cut kids who get along with their parents. What about the time Dawson said, "Did you ever notice that whenever your parental authority is most under question that you just start barking out orders?" They don't mention that anywhere. They disappointingly avoid grappling with the themes of lesbianism in "Election" or consider for once that anything might reflect the not-very-clean-cut teen REALITY. They acknowledge that some of these things "would get a real kid suspended", but did it occur the them that these are happening on campuses all the time and most of the time kids don't actually get caught? Every other analysis of real teens, and even the realer-than-reality-shows "American High" shows a wildly diverse group of youth today, most of whom are not clean-cut little honor kids who feel a duty to government.

The basic idea, which reflects NOTHING of anything that goes on around my day by day, or anywhere else I assume, is that teens have been rushing to values that would make FDR or Pat Buchanan proud. That we're held to unfairly high new standards and yet like those standards, as if we're actually dumb enough to think tight new restrictions on behavior are good for us. This "great" portrait of my generation is false, and would be nothing to celebrate even if they were true.


A soapbox for a conservative agenda   November 15, 2000
 18 out of 24 found this review helpful

Millennials Rising is about the generation of kids born 1982 and after, which the authors dub the "Millennial" generation, introducing them as a generation of civic, teamworking youth who will return conformity to the world. The writing is biased and the claims about this generation unconvincing.

Strauss & Howe go through chapter 1 writing in Q&A format: "Are they distrustful? No, they accept authority". They report that "half say they trust government to do what's right", this from a New York Times/CBS poll. According to this same poll of teenagers, 52% said homosexuality was wrong and 97% of respondents got along with their parents. The unrepresentative poll also reported that vast majorities never drank, smoked or used drugs, and only 38% of 16-and 17-year-olds had sex -- both of these way below the all the national figures.

They continue to ask-and-answer, "Are they rule-breakers? No, they're rule followers", mentioning lowering rates of teen crime, abortion and pregnancy. These figures only mean that kids are deciding some risks are not for them, not that they follow authority and rules. If today's youth firmly obeyed rules, drug use should also be falling. The authors also fail to take into account the rising economy later in the 1990s.

This book insists the reason the mainstream view of teens entails rebellious, edgy youth with baggy clothing -- "Generation X squared" -- is because Americans assume that every generation will be like the one before it. No, we have that image of teens because that's what we actually SEE! Wherever I go, kids look like "Gen-X" or "Gen-Y" in their black clothes, body piercing and disrespect of adults. The authors insult the intelligence of the reader with this and several other presumptions.

They write that in 1997 "CD sales plunged for the most heavily hyped alternative and grunge-rock groups. Viewers tired of heroin-chic fashion ads." Where did they get their sources for these? If viewers were tiring of heroin-chic ads, why are they still flooding the TV?

This book praises zero tolerance, both celebrating the war on adolescents and crackdown on teen sex, drug use and expression and painting this generation as submissive, "good-scout" youth who like restrictions imposed on them. It unabashedly speaks in favor of unwarranted searches, censorship at school, restricting the Net, curfews, drinking age and other attacks on the civil liberties of young people. It also falls to the odious propaganda of referring to these controls as "protection", as on page 117, where they write that these teenagers love rules, wanting "discipline" and "order". The authors write "Millennials support convention -- the idea that social rules can help", while attacking individualism as the root of societal problems throughout the book. They claim kids today have nothing to rebel against, then they go and acknowledge the barrage of oppressive rules imposed on youth by the same society they say has become too permissive! They do not acknowledge that teenagers are rebelling against strict laws and parents, a corporation-owned world, rigid social rules and repression of emotion, a puritanical backlash against sex, and drugs being illegal.

I know several teenagers personally, and they are not afraid to defy authority and very unlike the teens this book talks about. Here in San Diego there are many teenagers protesting against curfews. When lurking in teen chatrooms I've found this generation to have a somewhat anarchist mindset, some mentioning that most students at their high school want drugs legalized. The authors exalt the trend of uniforms in public schools, but conveniently avoid mentioning the many schools where student rebellions have quashed uniforms.

They emphasize vital statistics like decreasing juvenile crime and suicide, but use this as evidence that a more wholesome generation is filling the youth bracket, even though these trends are not concomitant with the 1982 birthyear they assert begins the generation.

In chapter 14 they advance to make some doubtful predictions for future. They predict "a new emphasis on manners, modesty, and old-fashioned gender courtesies" and contort the definition of rebellion by arguing that this generation "will rebel against the culture by cleaning it up, rebel against political cynicism by touting trust..." With all the things that adolescents actually DO rebel against, smuttiness is hardly the most pressing matter! And trust in government is the last thing we're going to need with corrupt and dishonest politicians, a drug war, money-owned politics and a system that can't get anything changed.

The authors also conducted some youth surveys of their own, but a class from Pat Buchanan's town will hardly be the most libertarian sample. A huge portion of the quotes are from McLean, the authors having pumped kids for quotes about their generation or academic pressure. The book is filled with quotes about what a bright, conventional, patriotic generation this is, but has ZERO quotes from people who have observed the opposite. Although one chapter briefly mentions other types of kids, the general volume is biased drivel that selectively picks from data and quotes while entirely excluding all the evidence that observes a different picture of youth.

The authors quote Douglas Coupland as saying "The kids have got their own thing going. Good." Coupland said this in response to a statement from someone else pitching a similar line about kids, but their use of this quote implies that Coupland himself observed a change from Generation X. They dishonestly take this and many other quotes (and probably many more) out of context, to sound as if observational evidence for their generational description is abundant.

Millennials Rising, in short, paints today's teenage generation as tightly structured, uncreative, square, compliant devotees of "civic duty". It's filled with value judgments, constantly trashing modern counterculture as "vulgar" and "nasty", and they insultingly assume that their readers will share their views. The book demonizes individualism and uncompromisingly sees this generation as one that will bring back an era of conformity and repression. This one-sided, reactionary, tunnel-sighted book is a waste of time for anyone trying to understand the teenage generation.


Someone who doesn't know kids   January 23, 2001
 18 out of 21 found this review helpful

Okay, I don't usually write reviews on Amazon, but when I found a book
that got today's teens so completely wrong, I had to write
something. The kids at my high school are nothing like the book says
we are. Kids do things whether their parents want them to or not. The
majority of people at my school are doing drugs, and certainly the
vast majority drink. All the zero tolerance policies haven't changed
anything, because the truth is that teens aren't going to listen to
adults like little automatons.

I thought it was so stupid the way
this book said teenagers have nothing to rebel against any more. Have
these guys actually TALKED with any teenagers? Most students at my
school rebel against the unfair school rules and hypocritical
teachers. One student at my school got suspended because he put up a
webpage (from his HOME computer) that made fun of the school. We have
one teacher who flunks everyone he doesn't like regardless of how well
they do on tests. Students are being forced to go to a place where
their rights are stripped away and they are being taught that there is
nothing good about America and that the first Amendment means
nothing. And the dress codes only teach students to rebel too. Just
because your school bans tank tops or hair dyes doesn't mean kids
won't wear them. There are tank tops all over school! And black is
probably the most popular color at our school (except maybe for
blue/denim). They quoted someone saying "Go to any high school
and you hardly ever see kids wearing black...clothing", but
there's tons of it every day, RIGHT HERE! Did the authors even bother
to check their facts? Teenagers also rebel against hypocritical
parents. The book stated that "hypocritical" and
"strict" were the two adjectives teens used most often to
describe their parents, but it still said we like the rules anyway!
What a load of tripe. My classmates still rebel against their parents
and know when they are in the wrong. Most of them hate authority.

The authors of this book say that the punkish kids shot up Columbine
because they felt alone when the campus population shifted from punks
to jocks and preppies because Generation X was replaced by a new
generation. But the reports on the shooting talked about how Columbine
was known as "the jock school" and "Abercrombie
High" for years and had always won the state
championship. Columbine was totally centered in on jocks long before
the Class of 2000 came in and the shooters' isolation has nothing to
do with generations.

All William Strauss and Niel Howe talk about
is how we want more discipline and "order" and stricter
rules. This book makes us sound like fascists. Half the statements in
here are completely false. I saw something just the other day that 70%
of teenagers are against restrictions of teens' Internet use. If you
really want to read about what kids are thinking, go find some other
book on the subject.




It's exciting, it will sell, but it's just not happening   August 21, 2005
 18 out of 22 found this review helpful

Millennials Rising is the latest book in the generational series by the authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, focusing this time on the generation born after X.

For those not already familiar with the authors' theory, Strauss and Howe are two authors who began writing about generations in 1991. They wrote the book Generations, which introduced a theory that generations fall into four re-cycling types, and each type comes of age during a different kind of era, or "turning". The Silent Generation is of the "adaptive" type, for instance, passive, gentle, and in tune with their emotions, and came of age during the Golden Age of postwar America. The Baby Boomers, remembered for their "Awakening" in the 1960s, are of the "idealist" type, concerned with God and spirituality and impassioned about what they believe in, but inclined to change during life (from hippie to the current "Just say no" control freak). Generation X, which they named the Thirteenth Generation, is of the "reactive" type, being alienated, street-smart and materialistic, without a feeling of need to be "loyal" to anything, coming of age during the 1980s and 1990s. They then first identified everyone born since 1982 as the "Millennial Generation", and predicted back in 1991 that it would be grow up to be optimistic, hard-working and clean-cut, just like the G.I. Generation that fought World War II, going back to the "civic" type generation before the Silent Generation. In 1993 they published the book Thirteenth Gen, which specialized in Generation X and why they are the way they are. In their third book, The Fourth Turning, they went back to the whole theory and writing about all the generations. They also changed the archetype names from adaptive, idealist, reactive and civic to Artist, Prophet, Nomad and Hero. Strauss and Howe wrote in this book about an upcoming era of epic battle and mass destruction, much like the one in which the G.I. Generation came of age. They then predicted the Millennial Generation would form the role of Heroes during the coming crisis, and they would lower teen pregnancy rates, stop using drugs, serve the United States, in uniform even, and desist with using profanity.

So then in 2000 they put out this book, Millennials Rising. In this one the authors try to explain the Millennial Generation (my generation). Millennials Rising attempts to identify who we, the most ethnically diverse generation in American history as they note, are. In Millennials Rising they write about this generation's Boomer parents and their influence on the Millennial Generation, as well as the kind of world in which this generation is growing up (which S&H think of as hundreds of television channels, SUV lifestyles, rappers who swear, and people who smack each other on TV). The book states that Millennials want to work together in teams, believe the people in authority know more about right and wrong than they do, are enthusiastic about learning and going to school, are loved and protected by their parents, achieve great things in school and will achieve great things in the future, and lest we forget, always want to exude that "positive peer pressure" on their fellow Millennials.

The obviously leads to the question, then, is the generation really optimistic, hard-working and clean-cut just as they say? Consider this: Only 28% of high school seniors say that the work they get assigned at school is "meaningful", only 21% describe their courses as "interesting" and still barely over a third, 39%, believe that what they do in school will have any relation to their success later in life. The generation was supposed to be enthusiastic about learning. The Millennial Generation also rapidly increased drug use, especially pot, from the level at which Generation X was using them in its teens, as even the authors themselves note.

S&H portray the world of edgy entertainment, such as television shows, movies and music, as a Zoroastrian battle. In popular music, for instance, artists are described by extremes that either represent the alleged Millennial values or go actively against them -- on one side, artists like Eminem, Limp Bizkit and Marilyn Manson, on the other, boy bands and Britney Spears and her imitators, along with such second-tier bands as the S Club 7. They do not deal with the Millennial interest in bands that lie somewhere in between the two. For instance, Blink-182 is just about the biggest band around now, and yet Millennials Rising does not mention Blink-182 and the many young fans who make the band a success. South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut is the authors' idea of where popular culture is today. Millennials Rising heralds boy bands as what music will increasingly be like as the current decade unfolds, and blasts the "edgy" bands as groups that will be washed away, but could the authors have predicted bands like Good Charlotte or artists like Avril Lavigne?

This leads to the bigger question of whether the book and the theory will be able to predict anything. S&H write about "rebelling by being better" during the present decade. Apparently, their idea of rebellion is not listening to Limp Bizkit, blasting censorship, or doing illegal drugs, but wearing preppy clothes, waiting until marriage to have sex, and trusting their government. According to them, we should expect to see Millennials petitioning for policies that will punish their own peers. S&H write that we will accept the draft and join the military in great numbers when the crisis presents us with a war, and even do National Service. Frankly, can anyone imagine any more than 20% of today's high school students doing their duty and risking their life in war in the name of America? Also, our generation has done nothing to make a commitment to following Bush as leader during the Iraq War, while S&H predict Millennials serving their president. How suited to a Hero generation is that? The G.I. Generation followed FDR so blindly they had to print his campaign materials in Braille. When it comes to rallying around their president and leading the direction of the nation during a crisis, Millennials have surely disappointed those who expected them to do just as the authors said we would. This, of course, does not have to be a bad thing, but it does make you wonder about the limitations of the predictive abilities of the theory.

Some parts of it make for very interesting reading, but all the talk about how they are to be the "next great" generation gets to you sometimes. S&H seem to believe you can never think too big about those Millennials. Millennials Rising presents an image of youth that is set to amaze you and will attract readers, but sometimes what the book describes just isn't happening.


Poor Book   March 17, 2006
 17 out of 21 found this review helpful

I read the Millenials Rising book and I have to say that I found that a lot of the things that were said in this book to be very dated and, for the most part, not revelant to today's teenagers and young adults. One thing that I've noted is that a lot of things have happened since the publication of this book, 9/11, the war in Iraq, etc. and it doesn't jibe with me that the authors stated that the entertainment the Millenials enjoy are "squeaky clean" which doesn't explain the popualrtiy of subsequent shows such as "Chappelle's Show", or "Boondocks" both of which are highly controversial.

I also get the impression that the authors only spoke to a certain group of people which undercuts the assertion that this is the make up of a generation as a whole and I get the feeling that there are other voices that were being ignored of a lot of subjects(such as Columbine) and doesn't really tell the whole story.

I think that this is a very poor book to look to understanding today's youth and, as such, I do not recommend it to anyone.