Somebody recommended this book to me, and I can’t remember who. Hopefully I will figure it out and talk to them because I don’t want them to take this review the wrong way. Which means, yes, I didn’t think much of Not Your Mother’s Morals: How the New Sincerity is Changing Pop Culture for the Better.

The premise of the book is solid: there is a “new sincerity” perspective that is driving significant moral change in our culture. As Fitzgerald says, it has become cool to care. I love the concept. Though I certainly can’t prove it with anything but anecdotal evidence, it rings true to me.

Unfortunately, Fitzgerald doesn’t give us much more than anecdotal evidence either. I wish he had taken more time to really study this and create at least some data to back it up. Pulling together a few Indie song lyrics, a few television sitcom premises, a few movie or book themes, and a personal statement from a few celebrities is not the same thing as validating a sweeping idea. The author makes a lot of assumptions and relies on conventional wisdom (which time and again we’ve found to be wrong). He weaves his personal story (which, by the way, is interesting and relevant) into the book … but again, that’s just his story, and not enough to move his thesis forward.

Further, I wish the author had focused a bit less on being cool (and even acting not cool in an effort to be cool). Maybe I’m just old. Maybe the author’s experience is so vastly different from mine (he’s young enough to be my son) that I have a hard time relating to the writing. But the bottom line is that this book strikes me as yet another in the long list of generational tomes that goes in and out of style very fast. Remember when everybody was trying to understand the GenX crowd? This book, which is very “millennial generation” in style, has the same short shelf life feel.

Toward the end of the book Fitzgerald claims that the New Sincerity is “…here with us now and I think it has the potential to outlive the fifteen-minute lifespan of most popular culture phenomena.” Okay, first of all, the “fifteen minutes of fame” line is itself a cultural perspective that has been with us for 50-years. Second, I hardly think that the peace/love movement of the 1960’s has faded from existence. Nor has the culture wars it created (though I suspect Fitzgerald and I would agree it’s long past time when those wars need to end). Nor has the civil rights movement (which, yes, is a cultural phenomena) that has been around since post World War II going to end anytime soon. Fitzgerald is showing his youth with a statement like that.

Get my drift? The book has a great idea, but it lacks execution. I really tried to like this book because I think the topic is spot on. Fitzgerald is on to something. But he loses me with his trendiness, his lack of documentation, and his platitudes toward conventional wisdom.