Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation

David Kimmel teaches history and Canadian studies at Brock University in
St. Catharines.

Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll—not to mention Dr. Spock, Barbie
dolls, crowded schools, and talk of a revolution—Owram describes them
all in the context of Canadian baby boomers’ first 25 years. His
coverage and analysis are excellent; this is a first-rate history. Yet
so pervasive is boomer culture that almost nothing in this large and
comprehensive book is new or startling.

Like it or not, the baby boom has rendered itself banal.

The reader is immediately struck by the predominance of
non-Canadian—particularly American—phenomena in the lives of the 3.9
million people born in Canada between 1946 and 1955. In some chapters
more than others, the author merely has to replay U.S./international
history with a Canadian overlay. Readers might expect to find more here
about the Guess Who than about the Beatles; Owram’s concentration on
foreign bands makes the subtle point that Liverpudlians were always more
popular and influential in Canada than Winnipegers.

More than anything, this is a book about culture. Owram adroitly
explores the continuities extending from the late 1940s into the 1950s
and 1960s. World War II delivered a high degree of standardization to
consumer tastes and material culture, so much so that some critics
wondered if society had survived the war only to reach “the end of
everything—the end of individuality, beauty, and privacy.” Modern
mass production brought tacky and unimaginative goods, synthetic
materials, and designed obsolescence, but it also “made modern
technology available to the average Canadian.”

The peace-and-love romanticism of the late 1960s—ironically, an ethic
most often associated with the baby boom—was relatively minor and
ephemeral, and Owram argues that it was a much more reactionary response
to the science and technology of modernity than a revolutionary
prescription for the future. In the end, the liberal–capitalist system
proved itself to be “more flexible and more insistent upon its
survival.” The baby boom never departed from its materialistic
origins. As a result, Toronto’s Yorkville emerges as the symbol of a
generation that

still dominates our society: once Canada’s hippie central, today it is
the commercial centre of a group of people so numerous that they have
shaped our tastes and grown wealthy in the process. It is unfortunate
that Owram chose to end his book after their first 25 years; the rest of
his life story may prove to be even more compelling.