Generation Ecch!: A Brutal Feel-up Session with Today's Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace

by Jason Cohen, Michael Krugman

Haunted by the spectre of the Beats and the Boomers, the Hippies and the Punks, today's twentysomethings are desperate for anything that gives them a generational self-image. This waggishly ironic book takes a riotous jab at the Generation X/twentysomething phenomenon and examines various aspects of their pop culture, including music, literature, and politics. Line drawings.

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Humor

176 pages, Paperback

First published August 24, 1994

Reviews

[Roland]

A nice early attack on Generation X, even if I disagreed with certain parts of it. I read this years ago, but I'm interested in knowing how people are going to be looking back on Generation X and what conclusions they're going to come to. After all the time devoted to the Boomers, I can only imagine what people years from now are going to be saying about their brood. This is a good starting point, since it was written in the middle of the 90s.

[Swankivy]

This was a rather amusing book I inherited from a friend and read. It's definitely aimed at a particular generation at a particular time, and probably wouldn't be very relevant now (except in some ways where society never changes--the alternamonkeys always seem to think their alternative group is a lot more wicked and revolutionary than every group that's rebelled inside the pen just like they are).

[Sasha]

What I learned from this book: How to be a cynical asshole.

Seemed like a good idea at the time. This book was the "Stuff White People Like" book of the early 90s. A+ for art by Evan Dorkin, but I'm embarrassed that I read this book and was proud of it for a while.

[Peter]

I try to reread this once a year.

[Dan]

As a fan of '90s alt-rock but really knowledgeable only about 1920s-40s pop, I read this in 1995 to prepare for a job in the NY Daily News feature section. Not necessary, as it turned out (I was a quick study on the job), but informative and fairly entertaining.

[Julie Decker]

This was a book about my generation, so I read it and recognized a lot of what it was talking about. I could see both the specifics and the generalizations as being essentially accurate, though there weren't many places where I felt like I was listening to people like me talk about people like me. I wasn't too big on the way the generations on either side of us were eyeballed like they were, in essence, either out of touch or whiny babies--I'm not a big fan of anything that suggests only OUR group is the enlightened one--but since the rest of the book both illuminated and mocked our generation too, I guess it was just the style.

[Patrick]

I got this because it makes fun of Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis, two authors I love, and figured whatever else they thought sucked I would probably be into as well. You have to think outside the box, people.

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio]

Dumb.

[Alonso]

Worth picking up only for the Evan Dorkin cartoons. The writing is irritating.