Since the passing of Auberon Waugh, there haven’t been many really successful right-wing comedians. The Mayor of London is one. Another is the American journalist and wit P.J. O’Rourke.
The alliterative title of The Baby Boom, his 20th book, essentially sums up its author’s style, his childlike boisterousness, his resonant infantilism. Its scarcely less suitable subtitle — ‘How It Got That Way, And It Wasn’t My Fault, And I’ll Never Do It Again’— is almost as revealing, indicating a man engaged in a conversation with himself and determined to have the last word.
Here his professed subject matter is the generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964: the lucky ones, in other words, who missed the horrors of the second world war but caught the high jinks of the 1960s (which as everyone knows, mainly occurred in the decade that followed).
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