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Book review: Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before — 3 Comments

  1. Good review. The anecdotal elements annoyed me too. They’re even more annoying, I’d say, in The Narcissism Epidemic, the follow-up book, where story after story is about someone’s cousin, someone’s sister, and so on. Did an editor recommend that sort of thing to make the book more “personable”? I wonder.

  2. I can’t say that I disagree that some of the next generation or so seem to have heightened expectations and a not-entirely-pleasant attitude when they don’t get their way as anticipated. I am not convinced generation is nearly as important as environment and socioeconomic class as an influence—my dad, who grew up poor on a farm, didn’t have much in common with the wealthier urbanites of his generation and wouldn’t have fit in with, say, Edith Wharton’s crew. And the generations have clashed since time immemorial, with the older generations always talking about the follies of the young. Yet here we are. Again. I don’t know if I can bring myself to read The Narcissism Epidemic. BTW, one Amazon reviewer attracted a lot of comments, with Twenge responding to them. Another commenter responded that it was narcissistic for an academic such as herself to get involved in the discussion of her book. Would you agree/disagree?

  3. I suppose that the give and take of the blog-o-sphere makes such responses inevitable, but I think there’s something unseemly about responding to criticism on a site that’s selling the book. One Amazon commenter calls someone who’s criticized the book a narcissist too (!).

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