The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: safe rides, candy shop, real culture war, New York, World War, Bat Ye'or (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

West, a Washington Times columnist with a hard-line conservative's interest in culture, sounds a dire alarm over an age she sees marked by the mainstreaming of countercultural behavior. An unprecedented reversal of priorities from parents to children has occurred since the 1950s, according to West, allowing for structural failures that permitted the behavioral revolutions of the 1960s to go forward unimpeded. To support her case, West draws on sources generally weighted to the right end of the political spectrum, like Robert Bork and Daniel Pipes. Her examination of the social repercussions of a new youth market would be better grounded within the context of the transformations in postwar American society, but she focuses instead on the negative aspects of these large and complex changes, without reflecting on her underlying assumptions. In her view, the prolonged adolescence of baby boomers has left America open to an insidious Islamization of culture via a misconceived political correctness that can't recognize the dehumanizing ideology of that religion. West, a vocal purveyor of distrust toward Islamic cultures, lays nothing less than the decline of Western civilization on the American counterculture, making her argument compelling only to those already in her corner. (Aug.)
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From Booklist

Writing in the Washington Times and elsewhere, West has proven to be a caustic critic of contemporary popular culture as well as a hawkish detractor of Islam. With this book, she fleshes out her archconservative worldview by arguing that today's popular culture is complicit in the threat posed to America by Islamic terrorists, and that the 1960s counterculture is to blame. In rejecting time-honored notions of adulthood (read: modesty, self-discipline, respect for authority) in favor of decadence and inclusiveness, she argues, the baby boomers inaugurated a culture of perpetual adolescence that erodes Western cultural identity. Channeling Samuel Huntington, West claims that this erosion of identity renders us incapable of countering potentially existing threats with adequate resolve and harshness. Although its first chapters weave together some anecdotal musings about the rise of youth culture, readers primarily interested in historical analysis might do better elsewhere. Readers seeking a sweeping polemic against the cultural Left, however, will enjoy this jeremiad's fiery indignance and playfully cutting prose. Driscoll, Brendan

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press (August 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312340486
• ISBN-13: 978-0312340483
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (56 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #324,813 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

75 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Oh Grow Up, Will Ya!, December 11, 2007

By	Philly Phool - See all my reviews

I was originally going to title this review "The Death of the Underlying Cause". It appeared to me that Ms. West had a lot to say, negatively, about the culture of the sixties, and spent a lot of time saying it while not delving in to find out the reasons why. Perhaps the sexual revolution and the drug counter-culture were really live-for-today attitudes spawned as the result of feelings of impending doom brought on by the Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation or the specter of going off to fight a hopeless war in Viet Nam. And is Rock'N Roll really all that bad? Yea, OK, some of it is, but a lot of it is insightful and well written. I tended to agree with her that our generation has produced its share of immaturity, but I was not convinced that it was any worse today than, say, 50 years ago.

Then a funny thing happened. She started hitting on several issues that were hard to deny. Like how children are more and more becoming the center of the universe these days. And how parents are doing less and less to impart our cultural values to these children. The vulgarization of language that recently popped up in the media and the soft-porn that is creeping into it as well. Stories of parents throwing wild parties for their kids that could never happen when we ourselves were children. The yearly ritual of spring break and the debauchery it spawns in our kids. Parents accompanying their kids on these 'binges' and renting hotel rooms for them instead of standing up to them as our parents would've. Rationalizing it all with an "at least they'll be safe" attitude.

Then she really gets going. The last three chapters, starting with one titled "Identity", begin talking about "moral relativism" and "multi-culturism" and how it is really the result of a lack of adult resolve and wishful thinking. She criticizes both of our last two presidents: Clinton for being a perpetual adolescent (who can deny that?) and Dubya for soft-soaping the Islamic threat and calling it a 'religion of peace'. Oh yeah, she has plenty to say about Islam but mostly our own lack of resolve in addressing the threat it poses. She also discusses modern ideas of what constitutes a 'hero'. Not too long ago a hero was someone who risked their life for family and/or country. Today we have what she calls the 'victim-hero'. Someone who suffers great indignities at the hands of some adversary, but really did not do anything that could be considered brave. Her point was not to diminish the plight of 'victims', but to delineate it from true heroism.

By the time I finished this book, I began to question my own motives. Perhaps we are all trying to hide our insecurities and avoid being adults. That would explain a lot of what appears to be happening these days. I will warn you that this book starts off sounding like your grandmother telling you to turn down that damn stereo. But if you give it a chance, you might be surprised at what you'll learn. Four stars instead of five for making us work to get to the 'good stuff'. If I was more of an adult, I'd probably give her five and thank her for the lessons learned in patience! Hey, I'm working on it.

88 of 96 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An insightful look at Western cultural disintegration., October 16, 2007

By	JanSobieski (United States of America) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Diana West's book deserves far greater attention than it is currently receiving. She manages to analyze several seemingly disparate cultural trends including Islamic appeasement, the devolution of our music, lack of civilizational pride and the deceits of political correctness and multiculturalism discovering the common denominator to be the infantilizing influence of the post WWII emphasis on youth with the resultant elevation of "youth" to its current cult like status. But it is much much more than that. Diana West provides the reader with that most coveted of reading experiences, the "ah-ha" moment whereby the reader is exposed to depths of insight and analysis that lead him to observations that he "felt" or "knew to be true" but left to his own devices might never have fully articulated. She's that good. I'm sure she wouldn't mind me saying that she's a bit of an anachronism in that she brings to bear pre-modern sensibilities that enable her to so successfully illuminate our current condition.

Diana West is a very bright and insightful author whose refreshing look at our culture and its decent into immaturity and callowness is long overdue. She tells us that we need to stop being afraid of being an adult, of standing for something other than self-indulgence. She castigates multiculturalism as as a childish refusal to make moral and ethical distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad. We need to stop being afraid to face the truth and speak openly about it. Instead we succumb to the childishness of relativism and nihilism rather than face the more cumbersome questions of adulthood.

According to West, many things changed as a result of the burgeoning wealth following the Second World War: "When you talk about the postwar period, the vast new affluence is a big factor in reorienting the culture to adolescent desire. You see a shift in cultural authority going to the young. Instead of kids who might take a job to be able to help with household expenses, all of a sudden that pocket money was going into the manufacture of a massive new culture. That conferred such importance to a period of adolescence that had never been there before." As a result of this elevation of the youth cult the adult authority was undermined and eventually adults abdicated their age old responsibilities.

"Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process." We have become cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded. As Mark Steyn too has pointed out, the welfare society has further contributed to the infantilization of our citizens.

Diana West's critique of our modern world is broadly based encompassing, in fact emphasizing, the extent to which contemporary music degrades our sexuality and undermines our capacity for mature monogamous relationships. Many who read this book, particularly those under 40 may be incapable of understanding much of what West writes so immersed have they been in the polluted cultural mainstream. West says, "It's not for nothing that Plato taught us to "mark the music" to understand and individual or his society. . . . . If the American popular song could idealize romantic love to a fault, rock 'n' roll degrades physical couplings to new lows - destroying not just the language of love and romance, but also the meaning of love and romance. And, I would sadly add, our capacity to experience both. . . .There are salient differences between a civilization that sings of romantic love and marriage ("Have You Met Miss Jones?"), and a civilization that sings of lust and one-night stands ("I Can't Get No Satisfaction")."

One other thing: Go to Diana West's web site and look over her columns. They are very very good. I've just recently discovered her since reading this book and her columns are every bit as good.

This is an excellent read which I highly recommend.

132 of 152 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars dead-on accurate, September 3, 2007

By	a citizen (NH, USA) - See all my reviews

Diana West's analysis is, as I say, dead-on accurate.
I've been watching the downhill spiral of changes of our society and culture myself since high school ~40 years ago.
It's way past time to honestly, boldly speak the truth; to yell out (as in the story Ms. West refers to), "The Emperor has no clothes."
The one-star review above is sadly light-years wide of the mark in virtually every one of its aspects.
It could not be expressed better than as is clearly stated in the words of that review itself: the positions, attitudes, and statements in that review represent a major part of the problem our civilization is facing.
Also sadly, yet another example of, "If it has to be explained to you, you'll never understand."
Merely pointing out the truth.
Read Ms. West's book; and hope there's some way we can rally our culture, get the grownups back in charge, and pull our society out of the cesspool.