DOMINIC W. MASSARO, editor
University of California, Santa Cruz

Storm and Stress Redux

Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, and Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before
By Jean M. Twenge. New York: Free Press, 2006. 292 pp. Cloth, $19.95.

Complaining about the young is an old, even ancient pastime. To Aristotle, being young was a state akin to being constantly intoxicated: "Youth are heated by nature, as drunken men by wine." In Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Act III begins with an old man grumbling, "I wish that there were no age between ten and three-andtwenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest. For there is nothing in-between but fighting, stealing, wronging the ancientry, getting wenches with child."