Hailed by national leaders as politically diverse as former Vice President Al Gore and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Generations has been heralded by reviewers as a brilliant, if somewhat unsettling, reassessment of where America is heading.

William Strauss and Neil Howe posit the history of America as a succession of generational biographies, beginning in 1584 and encompassing every-one through the children of today. Their bold theory is that each generation belongs to one of four types, and that these types repeat sequentially in a fixed pattern. The vision of Generations allows us to plot a recurring cycle in American history -- a cycle of spiritual awakenings and secular crises -- from the founding colonists through the present day and well into this millenium.

Generations is at once a refreshing historical narrative and a thrilling intuitive leap that reorders not only our history books but also our expectations for the twenty-first century.

The central tenet of this book is that generations don't age the same way, and when looking at generations through history, the correct way to look at them is by cohort - that is, by groups with similar birth years - rather than by age. In other words, if you're born in 1950 and grow up in the '60s and '70s, you'll be different at age 50 than you will if you're born in 1970 and grow up in the '80s and '90s. Strauss and Howe then trace a number of generational cohorts through American History, and find evidence of a cycle of generational types - usually a four part cycle, but in one case a three part cycle. For example, they liken Gen X (whom they call "13ers"), born in 1961-1980, to the "Lost" generation born in the late 1800s.

As a trailing edge boomer, born in 1960, I was not surprised to find that the authors, both boomers, correctly identify the defining characteristics of my generation - characteristics that I happen to dislike, as I'm in the minority that don't fit the mold that well, but that I have to acknowledge as accurate for the majority. On the other hand, the description of the Silent generation, to which my parents belong, was an eye opener - it explained well why my fathers views of what different stages in a man's life are like seemed so alien to me. The description of Gen X was likewise enlightening, both in terms of explaining some of my previous business interactions with Gen Xers (they always seem so surprised when someone actually gives them a break - turns out it's because they hardly ever get breaks) and helped me understand and interact much better with one particular Gen X who is very important to me - my wife. The description of the Millenials seems to be accurate so far for undergraduates I work with.

Two caveats when reading this book - first, remember it's American history, and the conclusions don't apply to those born overseas; second, the authors seem to emphasize the optimistic view of the future, for example focusing on the possibility that the current cycle will be a triumphant four part cycle, rather than an agonizing three part cycle as the Civil War cycle was.

At any rate, I'm now buying my own copy. I just wish I could find a hardcover, but hopefully it will still be in print when the paperback I'm buying wears out from repeated reference in a few years.


A seminal work in understanding generational behavior, and a pleasant read   January 2, 2006
 60 out of 61 found this review helpful

Strauss and Howe have written several books since this one, expanding upon their general historical thesis. But this one is the seminal book, the important one, and the one on which the others are based.

The book basically is a theory of American history that is premised on generational behavior. The authors have been quite successful in explaining and in some instances predicting the cycles of events, values and opinions of American society. It's very much worth reading simply because the reader is likely to experience an enhanced understanding of what is happening around him/her in the body politic.

The basic insight in this book is a simple one: Instead of trying to build a theory of American history (as did Arthur Schlesinger) that is based on unexplained "cycles" and "swings" from liberal to conservative and back again, why not simply look at how American generations behave as they age? When you do that, as Strauss and Howe have found, you find that American generations behave with a certain consistency throughout their lives. If their formative experiences push them in a certain direction while young, they'll continue to act in that way as they get older. That is, if you understand that history is really the process of different generations moving through time, then the swings of American history no longer look so mysterious; they appear as predictable manifestations of the fact that different generations with different life experiences have risen to the foreground.

Of course, you don't want to take all of this too sweepingly, or else it starts to seem like astrology or historical biorhythms. Generations are diverse groups, and no two people within a generation are exactly alike. But there are clear trends of generational behavior, which Strauss/Howe substantiate quite well.

Their basic model is that there are four basic generational types, which tend to occur in this order: Idealist, reactive, civic, and adaptive.

The GI generation (born 1902-1924) that fought WWII is a classic example of a "civic" generation. Consider their life experiences; when they came of age, they were asked en masse to participate in the greatest government-directed effort imaginable, fighting and winning WWII. Then when they got done with that, many of them went to school on the GI bill. When they were young, government spending and focus was oriented on youth. When they aged, government spending and focus shifted along with them, to where it is now focused on their elderly group, through Social Security, Medicare, and the other elderly programs that dominate the federal budget. It was natural that this generation would come to think of government's priorities being oriented in their direction as the natural order of things. They are civic-minded and they tend to have a more benign attitude towards government than do other generations. Accordingly, they are generally suspicious of change in the government approaches they know (for example, strongly against Social Security personal accounts, as opposed to a government-defined benefit.) Also, as a civic generation, they didn't focus their energies on redefining the values and purpose of America, they had a job to do (win the big war), and they did it.

Contrast that with an "idealist" generation, the "boomer" generation. Many in this generation grew up with an assumption of unlimited economic opportunity and security. They therefore turned their attention to spiritual matters, questioning and often rebelling against the values of the GI generation as well as its follow-up generation, the Silent generation. It was this "idealist" element of the boomers that unleashed the social revolutions of the late 1960s. This streak of strong opinions is visible in the boomers to this day; many of the political leaders who are regarded on both sides as being among the most shrill and uncompromising are from the boomer generation. This was also true when they were youth in the late 1960s; not only the activists on the radical left, but also those who retreated into a dyed-in-the-wool conservatism. The Silent generation prior to them didn't generally split into such poles.

The contrast between the "Silent" generation and the boomers is instructive. The "Silents" followed on the GI generation, looked up to them, generally shared their values, and sought to expand and liberalize them somewhat incrementally. The "silents" worked within the system: the 1950s, for example, saw civil rights expanding, Brown vs the Board of Education, etc. They sought to expand the blessings of liberty but at the same time were generally trustful of the leadership of previous generations. Not so the boomers; as the boomers came of age, they loudly, and often with great hostility, attacked the core value systems of the generations before them as being inadequate to progress, and sought to make a new, purer system of values. The silents wouldn't have been nearly so bold.

You can see the results in our national politics. The GI generation dominated the presidency for some time (Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush the Elder) and then handed the baton off to the Boomers (Clinton, Bush the Younger.) The Silent generation was simply skipped over.

The so-called "Generation X" (1961-81 birth years in this book) is a classic example of a "reactive" generation. These generations usually followed idealist generations, and didn't have the economic optimism of their predecessors, and thus didn't feel the same security to reimagine the spiritual basis of their nation. These generations often receive great criticism from the generation before them for failing to uphold their ideals. When the Strauss/Howe book came out, this was happening to Gen X much more than is the case now; the boomers, anxious to preserve their spiritual vision, often expressed concern and even disgust about the cynical, world-weary attitudes of the generation that followed them. But the Gen xers had had a different experience; they were not taught, as were the boomers, that life was always going to be sunny for them economicallly. The boomers were blocking the job pipeline as these Gen Xers entered the workforce for the first time. And their life experience with government is exactly the opposite of the GI generation;at every stage of the Gen Xers maturation, government's resources have been directed to benefit someone else. Whereas the GIs will get far more out of Social Security than they ever put in, Gen X will put far more in than they will ever get out; small wonder that Gen X generally wants to be given personal accounts instead of sticking with the old system.

Only over time have the Gen Xers won the respect of previous generations, just as did previous "reactive" generations of their type. A great analogy are the generations that came of age before the American Civil War. The analogues to the boomers then were the "transcendental" generation: the Thoreaus and the Lincolns and the Garrisons -- many of the abolitionists and civil disobedients who found the value system of their nation to be lacking. They unleashed a social revolution that exploded in the Civil War. Meanwhile, the generation behind them, the Ulysses Grants of the world, were thought to be mundane, unimaginative, unimpressive. But it was the Grant generation that fought and won the Civil War, relying on the resourcefulness that a tougher life had required them to learn. The Gen Xers are showing similar resilience now.

As said, you can't take any of this too exactly; otherwise it starts to seem like the Chinese zodiac; it's not the case that everyone born in the Year of the Bunny is lucky and affectionate. But it is still the case that formative experiences are often a key to understanding generational behavior. Strauss and Howe provide a very useful way to think about history, and an entertaining book to boot.




Fascinating, but take it with a grain of salt   October 27, 1999
 57 out of 59 found this review helpful

I found Strauss and Howe's hypothesis of a four-stroke generational cycle fascinating, and it does have a lot to say about groups behavior, especially how society treats its members of different ages at different points in time. It also suggests points of departure for other historical studies, like why bebop, modern science fiction, and slapstick Hollywood cartoons developed at about the same time. (A personal note; many of my favorite classical composers were born between 1860 and 1885, which nearly coincides with Strauss and Howe's "Missionary" generation.) Finally, the book has a lot to suggest about the nature of historical interpretation--how similar events occuring at different times might inspire very different reactions. The idea becomes problematic when the writers extrapolate from the behavior of groups to the behavior of individuals. First of all, some of their examples don't fit with the generations they cite. (Grace Slick, for example, was actually born in 1941, putting her in the "Silent" generation instead of the "Baby Boom".) Secondly, the profiles Strauss and Howe construct for "typical" members of particular generations are so general, it's easy to find some things descriptive of oneself and the people one knows. Because human beings tend to want to impose patterns on behavior where none may exist, these generational profiles don't necessarily have any more validity than, say, horoscopes. Another problem is that the hypothesis is only extended to the USA. While the appendix has some speculations on how the four-stroke cycle might work elsewhere, the writers don't provide the support for it that they do for this country. This leads one to wonder if the cycle applies outside the USA at all. Then too, in a time when nations interact more than ever, how societies whose generational cycles are out of sync affect one another? Again, there are some good ideas in this book, but readers should approach it with some skepticism.


Easily in the top 5 of history books, arguably Number One   June 22, 2003
 26 out of 28 found this review helpful

The theme of the book is that American history follows a repeating pattern comprised of four sequential "cohort generations" roughly 22-years each in length, thus the pattern repeats about every 88 years, give or take.

This is slow reading, but well worth the effort. If you expect to skim this book and get anything but sophomoric value out of it, forget it. The amount of research and scholarship to conceive the theory and back it up with examples is staggering to contemplate. No writers in the 20th century come even close to developing such a theory so well, although the authors readily admit that the seminal concepts for such a theory were suggested by half-a-dozen or so writers in the 18th and 19th centuries.

They use tables and figures to very good effect at appropriate places, and have extensive appendices and a helpful glossary to help you try to keep the nomenclature they use straight. Find the glossary and refer to it often after you begin reading.

At the very end of the book they pull summarize their theory in a comprehensive one-page table that can be used as a check list of the concrete supporting facts and characterizations they develop in the rest of the book.

The Appendices explain the why and how of developing their theory. Source material is extensively documented in Endnotes, with an extensive list of additional reading, as well as a Name index. The Table of Contents is very helpful for going directly to material and sections. It reflects their organized, methodical approach to their explication of the theory.

It is a great piece of scholarship that I wish I had known about when it was first published. I was halfway through it, and ordered several more to send to friends and relatives. Of the generations of which I have personal knowledge, they seem to be dead-on with their descriptions, finding something good and bad in characteristics of each of them. It is timeless as to those generations which have passed completely away, and time will tell about their objective assessment of the endowments that current generations will leave for the future.

Be forewarned that the authors' objective assessment of the personality characteristics of the "Boomers" (the cohorts from 1943-1960) do not paint a very nice picture of them from their "rising adult" phase through "midlife" through "elderhood". Arrogant, self-centered, self-absorbed, self-righteous, intolerant. As I said: dead-on. They still have a chance to redeem themselves as Elders (but I'm not holding my breath).

Every history book I read from now on will be with the benefit of the insights I gained from this book. The Iliad and the Odyssey are worth a re-read from point of view of the concepts in this book.

As another reviewer said, buy two, and keep one on hand to give to someone you like who you think will benefit from it.


Useful for political/consumer predictions?   February 21, 1998
 24 out of 40 found this review helpful

Despite the generally rave reviews of "Generations...", I must admit that I was skeptical. I have found during several years of interdiscplinary historical research that certain basic events such as the invention of iron by primitive man or the steam engine or computers led to fundamental change in peoples' habits of thought and behavior as they struggle to adapt to the cascading effects of these inventions. Strauss and Howe, on the other hand, tell us that four individual types of generations continually rotate through 90-odd year generational mindsets that are entirely independent of more basic historical events. They claim that understanding this pattern of generational repitition will allow us to predict the future (hence the subtitle, "the history of America's future, 1584 to 2069"). If true, the possibilities for forcasting trends in consumer preferences and political trends would be staggering. I had to give this book a chance despite its implausibility.After a careful reading I remain unconvinced. First, whatever they may in fact be able to predict is so vague and general as to be practically worthless. In constructing their types, they specifically "strip away the cumulative shape of civilization that [each type] inherits from the past"; this effectively excludes just about anything we would want to know - like "affluence, technology, basic social mores and cultural norms, and established political institutions". Yet even at this level of generality, they confess their predictions will often not hold up ("...surely bring many surprises").Second, the regularities they do find in the past are easily attributable to such factors as the boom/bust business cycle, wars, and technological inovations. For example, of the "Transcendental" generation (b. 1792-1821), they tell us that as adults they "felt nostalgia for their childhood". But this should come as no surprise since the prosperity they experienced as children was replaced in their adulthood by an economic bust period accompanied by the nation's first intense labor conflicts. While the authors seem to argue that the bust itself was caused by the mood of that generation, I know of no serious student of society that would find this argument convincing.As a businessman or politician I would be very leary of using "Generations..." to predict anything useful. Other far less pretentious methods already exist that yield far more useful detail and accuracy. Example: Faith Popcorn's prediction that the "cacooning" would grow in popularity. Based on a fine tuned reading of the media of the early 90's and an implicit understanding of the demands of the new workplace, Cacooning became part of a dominant lifestyle. Hard, detailed, and intelligent work - not an overly general and unsubstantiated theory - produced a useful prediction. The Vals approach similarly produced useful results. Both reached five to ten years into the future, a reasonablely useful timespan. (Note: for the full version of this review, contact me at cpalson@usa.net and/or cpalson@world.std.com)