Dave Barry Turns Fifty

The Barnes & Noble Review Dave Barry Turns 50 is a book about the really important moments and people in American history — about Kennedy and Woodstock and the invention of Silly Putty; about the Cuban Missile Crisis and Jimi Hendrix and the television debut of "Captain Kangaroo." It's about the good old days, and about how living through them leaves one ill-equipped to survive in the harsh, un-'60s-and-'70s-like world of today. In short, it's about being a baby boomer and getting old.Dave Barry brings his unique perspective to the above topics, as well as a host of others, as he looks back over his (now very long) life and waxes lyrical and absurd about the very best parts. Or at least the parts he can remember. He begins, after a gratuitously silly introduction, with "The Early History of the Boomers." All you Dave Barry fans out there know what his writing is like, but here's a little sample, just for kicks:The History of the Baby Boom generation is really the history of the entire species; for if we are to truly understand the Boomers, we must view them not as an isolated phenomenon, but as a result of all that went before them. And thus we must begin our story by travelling back in time millions of years, to the moment when the very first human being appeared on earth. After that a whole bunch of stuff happened, which leads us to...1947. This is the historic year when the first Boomers were born. The reason there were so many of us was that our parents' generation, having endured the misery of the Depression and the horror of the war years, evidently spent most of 1946 inthesack. At the time, they thought they were merely starting families, as humans had done for eons; they had no way of knowing that they were creating a unique, historic generation. If they had known, probably a lot more of them would have opted to join celibate religious orders. But