A compilation of bizarre snippets is enough for the authors. "Signposts are everywhere," Casale and Phillip Lerman croon. Over and over again. We can be young again. It's not too late--we can still change the world. Just click your heels three times and say....

UNFORTUNATELY, it's simply not true. The Baby Boomers put George Bush into office less than a year ago. They continue to spend themselves and the country into oblivion, leaving the next generation to pick up the pieces.

Casale and Lerman think it is highly significant that Baby Boomers are becoming increasingly concerned with protecting the environment. But green politics, while important, is more or less concerned with quality of life issues. It entails no sacrifice and is not really an effort to assist those who have been screwed over by life.

If the pollyanish theme of this book is not enough to make you cringe, the way it is written will. Casale is a pollster for USA Today, and Lerman is an editor there.

They seemed to have no difficulty adapting their newspaper's vapid and juvenile writing style into book form. They incessantly refer to the Woodstock Generation as if it were a single organism, with all its parts reacting the same way to events--much as USA Today refers to "the USA."

Here's an example of how the authors say the entire generation reacted after news of John Lennon's death: "The Woodstock generation was dumbfounded, got up, walked across the room and called itself on the phone." Wow.

The authors repeatedly refer to something called The Force, which they never really explain, but seems to have something to do with the karma of those who lived the '60s. Casale and Lerman have an annoying habit of capitalizing Things They Think Are Cute And Important.

THE bulk of the book is simply a year-by-year account of what happened in the U.S. between 1969 and 1989 and how it impacted the generation's collective psyche, usually making it more cynical.

But the news events, interspersed with inane chatter about "cultural" developments like disco and the pet rock phenomenon, are related with an incredible degree of shallowness. It's as if the two authors had pretended that USA Today had been around for the last 20 years, and compressed each year's top stories into bite size, retrospective nuggets.

Each random death--John Belushi's, Andy Warhol's, Rock Hudson's--is tied to the generation's mental state and imbued with cultural and sociological significance. Belushi's taught the generation of the danger of drugs, Hudson's of the need to come together to fight AIDS. Previously, the deaths of '60s heros (the Kennedys and Martin Luther King) made the generation cynical.

It is ironic then that Abbie Hoffman, quoted throughout the book as the conscience of the generation and the one who could lead it back to its roots, committed suicide while the authors were completing their work.

According to the previously set-up formula, activist Hoffman's self-induced end should have sounded the death knell for the generations' hopes. The beacon of idealism, the one who, unlike so many others, never sold out, had admited defeat and in a fit of exhaustion slid into death's enticing embrace.

BUT the authors were presumably already committed too deeply to their upbeat thesis when they heard of Abbie's death. I can imagine the crisis control meeting betweent the authors and their editors: "How the hell can we make this positive and still sell lots of books?"

They decided to close the book with a passage about Hoffman's funeral, chock-full of warm, touchy-feely stories about those assembled there. Included are upbeat lyrics of a Pete Seeger song about Abbie's spirt living on and a nice blurb about Abbie's mom clapping.

The book ends with a passage from Hoffman's writing. "No, sir, Flower Power ain't dead at all, brother, all we gotta do is get our shit together...and grow some thorns...Power to the People! Power to the Woodstock Nation!"

Admittedly, an engaging passage. But Abbie wrote it the afternoon after Woodstock--20 years ago tomorrow. The world has irreversibly changed since then. The '60s are gone, and they are not coming back. It's about time "The Woodstock Generation"--and authors Casale and Lerman--realized it.