Revenge of the Latchkey Kids: an Illustrated Guide to Surviving the 90s and Beyond

Rall wants to be an Angry Young Spokesman for his mid-30s generation, which he thinks has been warped by divorced parents, shortchanged by bureaucratized education, shoved aside by oafish corporate employers, and forced to take refuge in a subculture of anger and body-piercing masochism. He makes his case in dour cartoons and chapters, drawing on his own scrapes and bruises with headings like ''To Hell With Father's Day,'' ''America's Slave Labor,'' and ''Bring on the Stock Market Crash.'' The sporadically funny result plants well-aimed kicks on deserving corporate and baby-boomer behinds. But in the end, Revenge of the Latchkey Kids: an Illustrated Guide to Surviving the 90s and Beyond's seething social observations resolve themselves into a one-note whine. C+