The Death of the Grown-Up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization

by Diana West and Diana West

Book Overview

A provocative look at the rise of youth culture, the worship of perpetual adolescence, and the sorry spectacle of adults shirking the responsibilities of maturity. Firebrand conservative columnist... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312340486
• ISBN13: 9780312340483
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.43 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

An excellent analysis of our society's decline

If you have ever wondered, "What happened to our nation or our civilized society?" then this book is for you. It covers the history of our societal and cultural change over the past 80 years and explains why adults in our society no longer act like adults. It then examines the effects of that lack of parenting on the children in our world. An excellent commentary on the decline of America.

An insightful look at Western cultural disintegration.

Diana West's book deserves far greater attention than it is currently receiving. She manages to analyze several seemingly disparate cultural trends including Islamic appeasement, the devolution of our music, lack of civilizational pride and the deceits of political correctness and multiculturalism discovering the common denominator to be the infantilizing influence of the post WWII emphasis on youth with the resultant elevation of "youth" to its current cult like status. But it is much much more than that. Diana West provides the reader with that most coveted of reading experiences, the "ah-ha" moment whereby the reader is exposed to depths of insight and analysis that lead him to observations that he "felt" or "knew to be true" but left to his own devices might never have fully articulated. She's that good. I'm sure she wouldn't mind me saying that she's a bit of an anachronism in that she brings to bear pre-modern sensibilities that enable her to so successfully illuminate our current condition. Diana West is a very bright and insightful author whose refreshing look at our culture and its decent into immaturity and callowness is long overdue. She tells us that we need to stop being afraid of being an adult, of standing for something other than self-indulgence. She castigates multiculturalism as as a childish refusal to make moral and ethical distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad. We need to stop being afraid to face the truth and speak openly about it. Instead we succumb to the childishness of relativism and nihilism rather than face the more cumbersome questions of adulthood. According to West, many things changed as a result of the burgeoning wealth following the Second World War: "When you talk about the postwar period, the vast new affluence is a big factor in reorienting the culture to adolescent desire. You see a shift in cultural authority going to the young. Instead of kids who might take a job to be able to help with household expenses, all of a sudden that pocket money was going into the manufacture of a massive new culture. That conferred such importance to a period of adolescence that had never been there before." As a result of this elevation of the youth cult the adult authority was undermined and eventually adults abdicated their age old responsibilities. "Where sex is more available, there are no longer the same incentives building toward married life, which once was a big motivation toward the maturing process." We have become cut off from the past by disparaging everything old as outmoded. As Mark Steyn too has pointed out, the welfare society has further contributed to the infantilization of our citizens. Diana West's critique of our modern world is broadly based encompassing, in fact emphasizing, the extent to which contemporary music degrades our sexuality and undermines our capacity for mature monogamous relationships. Many who read this book, particularly those under 40 may be incapable o

dead-on accurate

Diana West's analysis is, as I say, dead-on accurate. I've been watching the downhill spiral of changes of our society and culture myself since high school ~40 years ago. It's way past time to honestly, boldly speak the truth; to yell out (as in the story Ms. West refers to), "The Emperor has no clothes." The one-star review above is sadly light-years wide of the mark in virtually every one of its aspects. It could not be expressed better than as is clearly stated in the words of that review itself: the positions, attitudes, and statements in that review represent a major part of the problem our civilization is facing. Also sadly, yet another example of, "If it has to be explained to you, you'll never understand." Merely pointing out the truth. Read Ms. West's book; and hope there's some way we can rally our culture, get the grownups back in charge, and pull our society out of the cesspool.

This was an easy one...

The only justification I need for knowing everything West writes is true is a stroll on any school campus in America. Bratty parents beget bratty kids. As a teacher, I cannot imagine a more detrimental consequence to kids today, than parents who won't grow up and teach them how to live in the real world. Capitalism didn't do it. Reagan didn't do it. We did it. All by ourselves. Personal responsibility, or lack thereof, can't be denied as the cause of the party-with-your-kids-parents who exist today. Read the book. Then read it to your kids.

must reading for American adults

This original, beautifully written and, at times, bitterly funny book is a fresh analysis of the phenomenon of perpetual adolescence and the associated perils. Diana West's brilliant survey asks questions that are rarely broached and fearlessly challenges the PC assumptions and truisms of both the left and right. The dangers she plumbs include our childish, PC response to the Islamic Jihad that confronts Western Civilization.