<p>&lt;b&gt;Boomers aren’t finished yet&lt;/b&gt; To AARP CEO Bill Novelli, the plus sign in his new book, 50+: Igniting a Revolution to Reinvent America, represents not only the second half of life, but also the process of rethinking how to spend it. Although a baby boomer turns 50 every 7.5 seconds and two-thirds of all people who ever reached age 65 are still alive today, Novelli believes that society has not kept up with this huge demographic shift. His inspirational yet down-to-earth book is a call to action for social change so that boomers and generations to come will enjoy both increased longevity and quality of life.<br />
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Novelli devotes each chapter to an opportunity, or area of change. These opportunities include transforming health care, reinventing retirement, revolutionizing the workplace, building livable communities, changing the marketplace, advocating for a cause and leaving a legacy. In each section, Novelli gives a brief history of the topic and real-life examples. According to Novelli, boomers and their elders control approximately 70 percent of the country’s wealth, which means that marketers, employers and politicians should find opportunities along with them. He dispels numerous myths individuals completely stop working once they retire, older consumers are reluctant to part with their money while giving examples of companies at the forefront of hiring mature employees and the benefits they’ve reaped. 50+ suggests that the best legacy boomers can leave the nation is changing the way society thinks about aging. &lt;i&gt;Angela Leeper is an educational consultant and writer in Wake Forest, North Carolina.&lt;/i&gt; </p>

From our archives: Remembering 9/11/2001
The 9/11 terrorists did not discriminate based on race, creed, gender or social standing. The victims came from all walks of life. This reality is reflected in the photographs from that day: the horrors of the destruction and the human toll were captured on both film and digital images. Author David Friend is equally egalitarian in his selection of photographs, and the stories of the people who shot the images, in his captivating book, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11.

Friend, a veteran photographer and Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development, chronicles the events of September 11 and its aftermath through the eyes and camera lenses of both professional and amateur photographers. The photos in the book are gripping. Equally compelling are the tales behind them. For example, there is the account of a gallery owner who laced up his Rollerblades and used a $200 camcorder to shoot footage of the smoking World Trade Center towers. A computer programmer fastened a video camera to his bicycle handlebars, aimed it behind him and recorded scenes of one tower collapsing as he sped away. A commuter shot video through the windows of a subway train as it rumbled across the Manhattan Bridge.

Some of the stories and images are more personal. There is the seasoned photojournalist who shot pictures from her powerboat, praying all the while because the scene was more disturbing than the armed conflicts she covered in Bosnia and South Africa. Or the artist who stood on her roof and shot a portrait of the placid face of her neighbor’s 16-month-old son, with the damaged towers serving as a backdrop.

There have been millions of words written about the tragedy of September 11, but Friend makes a strong argument that the images tell the real story. Photographs, that September and thereafter, Friend writes, have helped to shape our understanding of the week’s events, and have helped us mourn, connect, communicate and respond. There were many heroes the victims, their families, the rescuers. Friend makes a convincing case that the photographers were also heroes in their own way. They risked, and in some cases lost, their lives, to preserve history. There were thousands among us, Friend writers, who had the poise and wherewithal to pick up a camera so that the world might witness and respond.

John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

I blame the minivan, says journalist Christopher Noxon, referring insouciantly to the brainstorm behind Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grown-up. Faced with a growing family, he morosely swaps his single-guy ride for a family-man van, a vehicle with the power to prompt a rejuvenile reckoning. Rejuvenile is Noxon’s playful reckoning with a curious sociological phenomenon, a new breed of American adult who cultivate(s) tastes and mind-sets traditionally associated with those younger than themselves. Many rejuveniles wait longer to move from their childhood homes, marry and start families and give up skateboarding. As Noxon’s breezy, contrarian reportage shows, they are obsessed with playtime, Popsicles, Legos and Disneyland anything that can revive the wondrous, fun and carefree qualities of childhood. Noxon, admittedly driven by his own inner child, wants to know if this trend is a refreshing new take on adulthood, or rank irresponsibility. With the focus of a toddler entranced by a bright, shiny object, Noxon examines rejuvenalia’s roots (blame it on Peter Pan), how rejuveniles work and play and the toys they choose to play with (mouse ears, anyone?), and their social and parenting skills (or lack thereof). Especially intriguing chapters are devoted to the toyification of American culture and the influence of Uncle Walt Disney.

Rejuvenile is an amusing read but lacks heft as an important sociological study; the author seems more fascinated with the quirkiness of his topic than in plunging into the depths and illusions that motivate this current mode of human behavior in America. The book’s final chapter is a conflicted, inconclusive wheeze on the future of the rejuvenile grown-up (oxymoron, anyone?), which Noxon tries to shore up with erudite references to Rousseau, Einstein, Montagu, and existential query: On balance, are we born good or bad? The jury hopefully peopled with mature, clear-thinking grown-ups is still out on that one. Alison Hood is a writer in San Rafael, California.

Crackling with the author’s edgy wit and wisdom, Caitlin Flanagan’s To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife is a collection of essays examining the key trends, issues and stereotypes surrounding today’s wives and mothers. Through reports on topics like nannies, white weddings and the demands of housekeeping, she traces the evolution of the maternal role in American society. Contrasting the past specifically the 1950s with the present, she provides unique insights into the domestic arts and how our culture’s perception of them has changed.

In Drudges and Celebrities: The New Housekeeping, an ironic examination of Martha Stewart and the packaging of the perfect household, Flanagan writes, almost any project Stewart cooks up is less daunting than the one it is meant to replace: keeping a family together, under one roof, home. Throughout the book, she mourns the passing of traditional domesticity, wherein the measure of a home was found in the woman who ran it. A frequent contributor to The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, Flanagan is herself a mother and a wife, and she brings experience and intimacy to these essays. Flustered mothers and frustrated wives will find just what they need here: a little camaraderie.

Not so fast, Mr. Brokaw. They won World War II, but just what did your greatest generation do in the years after they returned home to end racial discrimination, diversify and democratize the campus and the workplace, extend political rights to women and gays, protect the environment, curb military adventurism and hold government accountable for its duplicity and mistakes? Leonard Steinhorn, who teaches communications at American University, has had enough of this giddy adulation of World War II vets and the media’s tendency to hold them up as personal and civic role models. Steinhorn argues quite persuasively in The Greater Generation that it is the baby boomers, particularly the ones born just after World War II, whose monumental good works have moved this country closest to its founding ideals, even as they were being mocked and denigrated. The far right routinely depicts boomers as self-indulgent hypocrites, all style and no moral or intellectual substance. Quite the opposite, says Steinhorn. Empowered by their vast numbers and network of like-minded peers, [boomers] became a generation unafraid to examine the precepts on which society and their identity stood. . . . Boomers began to challenge old assumptions, modify outmoded laws, modernize personal and institutional relationships, and change the social values that guide the way we live and act toward one another. Instead of reading doom into recent conservative political victories, Steinhorn sees them as the last gasps of a foiled generation that is dying out. He maintains that the best evidence that boomers have won the cultural war is that even the most conservative politicians have to cloak themselves in boomer rhetoric to survive. Whatever their private views, he says, they dare not be openly racist, sexist, homophobic or environmentally insensitive. (They have talk-show surrogates for that.) While lauding the boomers, Steinhorn says they have more to do before they shuffle off into oblivion continuing the fight for a better environment, promoting greater integration of races and cultures, defending and extending the particular interests of older women, insisting on more transparency from government and not least demanding suitable recognition for their own contributions.

If it’s ever made into the movie for which it’s already been purchased, Storming the Court may do as much to romanticize lawyers as All The President’s Men did to glamorize journalists. The book tells how Yale law professor Harold H. Koh, a handful of his students and a few fellow lawyers repeatedly went to court against the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton to gain the right to provide legal services to a group of Haitian refugees imprisoned in 1992 at Guantanamo Bay.

Thousands of people had fled Haiti following the 1991 military overthrow of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Some of these the U.S. granted asylum, but most were sent back or confined at Guantanamo. Eventually, the Coast Guard began intercepting the refugees on the high seas and, contrary to the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951, returning them without the benefit of review.

Author Brandt Goldstein was himself a law student at Yale while all this was going on, but he was not one of the activists. Relying on multiple interviews with the principal players, court documents and contemporary news accounts, he spins out a fast-paced and cinematically vivid thriller. Besides covering the seesaw court actions and the behind-the-scenes struggles accompanying them, Goldstein also presents the concurrent story of Yvonne Pascal, an Aristide supporter who has had to escape without her husband and children and who ends up at the Guantanamo prison camp leading a hunger strike.

Goldstein portrays Koh and his students as impassioned idealists who must take their chances and lumps in a world of harsh and uncaring politics. One of their adversaries is the ubiquitous Kenneth Starr, then Bush’s solicitor general. Koh and company expect the government to be more compliant on the issue of the Haitians once Clinton comes to power. But it isn’t. The little band of advocates win the immediate goal of freeing this particular group of prisoners, including the heroic Pascal. But they fail to set the precedent that due process shall apply to Guantanamo as more recent cases have demonstrated. Still, this is a tale that warms the heart even as it clenches the jaws.

<b>Life lessons for Father’s Day</b> Tom Mathews’ <b>Our Fathers’ War: Growing Up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation</b>, is a moving look at the struggles between combat veterans of World War II and their sons. Mathews breaks through the unwritten code of silence to reveal the emotional turmoil of these veterans and shows how their experiences altered their views of life, family and their role as fathers. The book is an emotional tour of traumatic pasts and strained relationships (few more so than Mathews’ own fractured connection with his father, a veteran of the 10th Mountain Division’s bloody Italy campaign). For the civilian, it is a rare window into the shocking hell of war, confessed by men who descended into it and returned, wounded in body, mind and soul, unable and unwilling to explain their experiences to those they should be closest to. To read this book is to understand that the sacrifices of war don’t always end when the combat does, and that even victory can leave scars that cross generations.

<i>Howard Shirley is a son and a father.</i>

Water and oil: two valuable natural resources in Iraq. They are elements that have led to civil war and foreign invasion over the centuries, defining the fractious history of that country. William R. Polk makes this point in convincing fashion in Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History, from Genghis Khan’s Monguls to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation, a detailed examination of the country from its tranquil origins to its tumultuous present-day situation.

In ancient times, when Iraq was known as Mesopotamia, its greatest resource was water, as supplied by the intersecting Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Nomadic tribes migrated to this area, known as the Fertile Crescent, establishing roots and hastening the development of civilization. But eventually the tribes fought over property and power, setting a theme of upheaval that would continue throughout Iraq’s history. When the tribes weren’t warring amongst themselves, they were fighting invaders the likes of Genghis Khan’s Mongols and the Ottoman Turks, each seeking to extract the natural treasures of the land.

In the early 20th century, British imperialists, needing oil to fuel the Industrial Revolution, discovered Iraq was situated above the largest oil reservoir in the world. Even when Iraqis took back their country through revolution in 1958, factions continued to fight. And when they were later united by a heavy-handed dictator named Saddam Hussein, he used the oil to amass great wealth and power and to fund wars with neighboring nations.

Today, Iraq is occupied by the U.S. in what President Bush calls an effort to replace dictatorship with democracy. Polk thinks the occupation still has a lot to do with oil, and his analysis is written with authority, given that he has been studying Iraq for 50 years and has visited the country dozens of times. For anyone seeking an intelligent perspective on the current state of affairs in Iraq, his book is required reading. John T. Slania is a journalism professor at Loyola University in Chicago.

<b>The collapse of Enron’s house of cards</b> Surely at some time in its tawdry history, Enron or one of its myriad corporate affiliates must have produced, developed or delivered some product or service to someone who wanted it. But from reading Kurt Eichenwald’s absorbing account of the rise and fall of the Houston-based energy company, one is likely to conclude that the sole mission of its top executives was to find quasi-legal ways of collecting money through stock sales and loans and keeping as much as possible for themselves. The chief players in this boardroom (and bedroom) drama are by now legendary: company founder Kenneth Lay, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling and ex-CFO Andrew Fastow. Fastow and his wife have been sentenced to prison; Lay and Skilling are awaiting trial.

Although Enron’s story is more convoluted than a Medici revenge plot, Eichenwald, who covered the scandal for the <i>New York Times</i>, spins out the essential facts in quick, colorful scenes. He recreates the dialogue of the principal characters as convincingly as if he had been at their elbows taking notes. However, some of the scams Fastow devised to enrich himself are almost beyond understanding, a factor that helps explain why it took so long for this house of cards to tumble.

Eichenwald, author of the the 2000 bestseller <i>The Informant</i>, describes Enron as a triumph of concept over principle. Once an executive got an idea for a business deal no matter how far-fetched it was the next step was to bend the law, industry regulations and accounting principles to conform to that vision. By 1998, Eichenwald writes, This was a company . . . where the only impediment to pursuing a new business was initiative. The usual controls expense limits, financing constraints vanished. Of the many vivid scenes in the book, these two linger: on April 7, 1999, Lay announces that his company has pledged $100 million to name the new Houston Astros ballpark Enron Field. On Dec. 2, 2001, a paralegal in a Houston law office clicks the submit button to file papers to declare Enron officially bankrupt.