Matthew Gleick

Engaging and rigorous, July 10 2004

Although there's little debate that baby boomers transformed America in important ways, there are surprisingly few books that try to analyze in meaningful ways what the boomers actually did and what it means, in the first place, to talk about the Baby Boom as a distinct generation. Gillon rectifies that with this book, which uses the stories of six different boomers of dramatically different social and cultural backgrounds to illuminate the experience of a generation.

Needless to say, the people we now call boomers were hardly all alike, and there were all sorts of ties -- ethnic, religious, professional -- that connected them more closely to people in other generations than to people in… Read more

Relevant and surprising, July 10 2004

Although the subtitle to THE WISDOM OF CROWDS is an awkward mouthful, it is at least accurate: the book does an exceptional job of illuminating a remarkably wide range of material from politics, everyday life, and the business world. Surowiecki's not offering a grand unified theory of everything, but in the course of investigating how and when groups and crowds are and are not intelligent, he takes you on an exhilarating ride. You can't go more than a couple of pages without coming across some interesting factual tidbit or clever anecdote. Just a short list of stuff Surowiecki writes about includes: crowds on city sidewalks, Navy men trying to find a lost submarine, the Nielsen ratings,… Read more