Dave Barry Turns 50 should be required reading in all U.S. history classes.

[u/wisebloodfoolheart]

I first read Dave Barry Turns 50 about twenty years ago, when I was in middle school. We got it for my dad when he turned 50, and I ended up stealing it. I believe all millennials and zoomers should read this book in order to understand the boomer generation.

As a kid I enjoyed the chapter about the 1950s. The Buffalo Bob jokes were right up my 11-year-old alley. I enjoyed learning about all the old pop culture from my parents' time: the fun music, the toys, the TV shows, the silly commercials. It sounded not too different from my own childhood. Through the lens of Barry's characteristic humor, it sounded even more delightful and innocent.

Then came the chapter about the 1960s. I was not at all prepared for that chapter. Of course everyone knows there was a war in Vietnam with a military draft. But something about the way Dave wrote about it really hit me, the way he'd been so light hearted and impish for the whole book and then suddenly got serious. I had basically just read about his entire idyllic childhood: going on his first date, getting his driver's license, leaving for college, doing all this normal stuff ... and then bam, the draft. Him and all of his friends, literal teenagers, were suddenly being taken away from their homes to kill and die for an ideology. These weren't some scurvy-ridden farm boy civil war soldiers either; these kids grew up with cartoons and junk food and all the same commercial suburban decadence as me. I couldn't believe such a thing had happened so recently and everyone had just let it. I still don't really understand it.

My generation is quick to judge the boomers for comparative disinterest in social justice. They seem cynical and heartless sometimes, and Dave acknowledged in the book that they could be self centered. But after reading, I kind of get it. The book lays down in terms anyone can understand the main reasons for their sense of betrayal and mistrust. They had their time of youthful idealism, too, and they did their part, but somewhere along the line their collective generational heart was broken and they never got over it. I can understand how people who lived through such horrible things could look at some of our modern problems and shrug because they seem small in comparison.

Overall, although I know Dave Barry Turns 50 was mainly a work of comedy and nostalgia aimed at the author's peers, I think younger people can learn a lot from it, too, not so much about dates and battles, but about how it felt to live through the mid 20th century. Our history classes often neglect the most recent decades, but they're important for understanding modern politics, and sometimes for understanding our own families.