Millennials Rising
by Neil Howe and William Strauss
Vintage Books

"Millennials Rising" is a bizarre but resolute attempt to describe and flatter America's children, also known as Our Future. "Millennials" is the name the authors hope will become a popular label for the 76 million Americans born since 1982. The authors — Neil Howe, a deskbound political activist, and William Strauss, a director of the comedy troupe "Capitol Steps" — have attempted to define Millennials in sharp contrast to "Generation-X," to which, dear reader, you probably belong.

Mainly, they report that Millennials are "upbeat" and "engaged" and undeserving of the "torrent of bleakness" in press coverage about them in the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, which the authors claim was "a symptom of a better-behaved and higher-achieving generational core confronting the residue of an earlier youth era."

"Millennials Rising" is a 400-page gumbo of facts and quotations. Authors Howe and Strauss never met a sentence about today's kids that they didn't find worth treasuring and including in this book or in their previous books, which won a lot of reviewers' ink, such as "13th Gen," "Generations" and "The Fourth Turning." This latest book, like the others, mixes statistics from responsible data-collectors such as the Institute for Social Research with results from scientifically unrepresentative surveys of 200 high schoolers in Virginia and from postings on their websites (www.millennialsrising.com and www.fourthturning.com).

The authors also make their predictions by using the "life-cycle hypothesis," which is marketers' lingo for "a concept as old as Exodus, the 'tempers' of ancient Greece, the Celtic wreath, and the circularity of Navajo sand paintings." The life-cycle hypothesis says that "roughly once very twenty years or so, around the time all living generations start new phases of life, the social mood changes direction." Who knew?

Using this hodgepodge of material, the authors springboard to some wacky conclusions about the most overfed, overbundled and overprotected generation in American history. They say Millennials will soon remake America into a new country, a country that sounds an awful lot like East Germany, given how much time these youth spend playing organized sports, listening to the theme-park-style positivity of boy bands and dressing alike by wearing uniforms mandated by schools or peer pressure.

Connoisseurs of oddball facts can rejoice at the publication of "Millennials Rising". Did you know that the most popular name for a girl in the 20th century was Sarah? Did you know that 12 percent of grade school kids are obese? That only 27 percent of high school students took a daily gym class in 1997?

Did you know that a national survey showed that kids age 3 to 12 spend only 33 hours per week now in free play and unorganized outdoor sports compared with 52 a week in 1981? Did you know that the number of high schoolers holding down part-time jobs is at an all-time-low? Did you know that a high school in Amherst, Mass. banned "West Side Story" "in part because its celebration of teenage violence couldn't pass muster today?"

All these factoids are presented in a scattershot manner throughout. Call it Pop-Up Sociology, after the VH1 Pop-Up Video feature which makes similar use of oddball facts. Ultimately, though, despite its handicaps, "Millennials Rising" remains a unique point of entry for anyone who has sniffed teen spirit and wants to contemplate the "zit-geist" in earnest.

— Sean O'Neill (NewsFromDC@cs.com)