Writing Boomer History
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Tom Brokaw's last book, The Greatest Generation, gave the laurels to the the plain people of the World War II generation. Following it with BOOM! is tricky. Us boomers want the laurels as well, but Tom has already given them away. The message is probably to forget the laurels and focus on the message of the sixties generation to see if perhaps there is something to run with.
One of Brokaw's closing essays is about Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame. Citing Kesey's Cuckoo's Nest and Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Brokaw builds Brand into the first man who wanted to see the whole earth from space, thus the pictures of earth on the original Catalog. His message became "here I am, protect me" (Brokaw, 599).
Steven Jobs saw the Catalog as the Google of its day and quoted the back page of the final edition in a graduation speech at Stanford in 2005: "Stay hungry. Stay foolish." (Brokaw, 601).
Maybe that's useful to us boomers, today, as well.
Brokaw, Tom. BOOM! Voices of the Sixties. Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today. Random House. 2007.