Most people who lived through the era labeled the Sixties will rightly cast a jaundiced eye toward Tom Brokaw's latest effort to reduce people and events to the sound bites he was so adept at delivering on "NBC Nightly News."

As in:

"The Sixties also brought us bean sprouts, brown rice, veggies, yogurt, whole-grain bread, holistic medicine and drugs ..."

Apparently, they just showed up one day.

Straight-arrow Midwesterner Tom himself sampled a drug or two during those crazy years. "I even inhaled," he confesses. Far out, man.

His best-selling 1998 book, "The Greatest Generation" was a surefire project inspired by patriotism and a real sense of gratitude for the people who sacrificed so much during World War II.

And while Brokaw has ridden that horse to exhaustion with a collection of spinoffs, the war continues to be big business for other authors and filmmaker Ken Burns.

It was clearly time for the one-time anchorman to move on in his new career as oral historian. The logical choice, especially for anyone who has tried to explain the world in 30-second cliches, was that wild and, like heavy, time of 40 years ago.

As Brokaw tells us, the mantra is, "If it feels good [and it's easy to find people to talk to], do it." And talk he did, cornering 86 (as best as I could count) people who came of age after 1960.

Some are household names -- Bill Clinton, Paul Simon, Warren Beatty, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich -- while others are lesser known, including Peter Davis, who issued the ultimate put-down of Brokaw's "Greatest Generation."

"What they gave us," wrote Davis about the war veterans, "was Vietnam." A filmmaker, he had directed the fine documentary on that war, "Hearts and Minds."

"I said I believed it was a great, but not a perfect, generation," Brokaw grudgingly backtracked.

It's clear, though, that the '60s crowd was less homogeneous and harder to corral than their predecessors. Contrasting their experiences with their lives today makes it painfully clear that the era cannot be generalized, but no era can be.

Or, as Brokaw puts it: "The cataclysmic events were so sweeping, complex and consequential that they cannot yet be encoded into great truth."

Now, that is a great truth, man. Inhale some more, Tom.

Some try, though. Rove, now in Texas plotting for next year's elections after serving as President Bush's main strategist, opined:

"It's funny, you look back on 1968 and think everybody was against the [Vietnam] war -- and two of the candidates were not [Nixon and Wallace]. And they got nearly 60 percent of the vote."

The truth is that Nixon pretended to be "against the war" by claiming to have a "secret plan" to end it while the one man who would have defeated him -- Robert Kennedy -- was dead. Wallace was a sideshow.

Brokaw never challenges Rove's assumptions nor anyone else's in "Boom," so titled because he believes the '60s "blindsided us with mind-bending swiftness," like, you know, "boom."

To borrow another cliche, this "Boom" is a bust.