Rating: 
Summary: Get This Book
Review: The reader gets two benefits from reading this book. One the real Ken Wilber is better known by the reader and two it is packed with timely criticisms concerning the baby boomer generation and postmodernity. While it is written in novel form, and at a surface level appears to be life 101 with some college kids, at a deeper level, one that is usually neglected, this work is pure gold. Gold that can be used right now in one's life as they confront the world. Wilber is probably the most authentic philosopher practicing and pays homage to no one or thing except what he understands to be true. Not many writers do this with honestly and none with the originality of Wilber.
Rating:
Summary: Wilber 101
Review: This book attempts to introduce some of Ken Wilber's ideas, such as Integral Psychology, to a mass audience by interspersing it in the form of lectures given to college students. Like several of the Daniel Quinn books (Ishmael, Story of B), the meat in Boomeritis is in the lectures and subsequent discussions, the minimal plot being merely a connecting device which occasionally wears tedious. A better way for those who do not wish to tackle Wilber's non-fiction books than reading this is the audio set "Kosmic Consciousness" in which Ken gets 12 hours to expound on these ideas in an occasionally hilarious interview which highlights Wilber's personality better than his books. Still, if you can wade through the occasionally bizarre "plot", Boomeritis has a lot of stimulating ideas that will certainly get you thinking, and the self-referential post-modernist stuff can be quite funny. And if you'd like to learn more about the musician "Stuart" in the book, visit the real life Stewart Davis website for some great music.
Rating:
Summary: America's ... Bodhisattva's Brave New World
Review: What will realize god-consciousness first- Carbon or Silicon?In Boomeritis, Ken Wilber's first novel, and probably his most avant-garde project yet (which is saying quite a bit), the philosopher-sage from Colorado jumps into the pop spirituality marketplace with a book that pokes fun at the New Age movement, takes a flamethrower to the sacred cows of what Spiral Dynamics refers to as the "mean green meme", and has enough raunchy sex fantasies to make Robert Anton Wilson blush. This ain't James Redfield or Deepak Chopra, not by a long shot. "Boomeritis" is the "Great Postmodern Novel". It's about nothing but theory, filled with two-dimensional characters and silly, cruel dialogue, constantly self-references, interrupts all meaningful thoughts with lewdness, reduces all meaning to surface features and irony- and this is precisely what makes this novel so brilliant. In writing such a novel, Wilber shows his reader precisely what is wrong with "flatland" by subtly [pulling] the reader into his worldview, and then bludgeoning the reader with the realization that he's been had- that the shallowness of the novel and the endless gags are nothing but a ploy and a put on by a literary zen master in an attempt to beat the reader into awakening. It's a turnabout that will catch the reader unprepared, even if he thinks he's prepared for it. Wilber's deviousness and tongue-in-cheek humor, though evident in his scholarly works as well, are out in full force here. But "Boomeritis" is more than just an extremely long koan. It's a musing on consiciousness, artificial intelligence, and meaning. It has a wonderful segment in which Wilber relates true stories from his friend, the musician Stuart Davis, who is featured as a prominent character in the story. Best of all, the ending is an absolute blast. Pick up Boomeritis, for Wilber tells the truth, if in a somewhat roundabout way- this novel will set you free.
Rating: 
Summary: Novel (bad) of ideas (mostly good)
Review: Wilber is a strange character. He's unbelievably smart and unbelievably well-read. He's also unbelievably goofy, so reading him is often like meeting up with a version of the owner of Garfield the Cat with a 300 IQ.
This book tracks the attendance of a 20-something young man (with a 300 IQ and a hopelessly goofy personality) named Ken Wilber at a series of lectures at something called the Integral Center. He is a student at MIT and working on some sort of artificial intelligence project with the idea that silicon can develop the consciousness that flesh has now and evolve much more quickly and that the two consciousnesses might someday merge (as in Kurzweil's Age of Spiritual Machines) -- of course there's an alternative, sinister possibility (as in Dan Simmons's Hyperion books) but neither of these possibilities is really explored (Wilber ultimately arrives at a new understanding of the flesh and silicon evolutionary processes). The real point of the book is a kind of exposition of Wilber's version of Don Beck's spiral dynamics theory of human development.
We get this fed to us through a series of lectures by a series of cardboard characters distinguished by superficial qualities (skin color, sexuality, eye color) but who all speak the same wooden dialogue. These monologues are punctuated by character Wilber's erotic imaginings which arrive with the mindless frequency and communicative vacancy of a series of obscene phone calls. In between the lectures, Wilber meets with his peers who exchange would-be witty put-downs and eat meals. There are hints of sub-sub-sub plots - this one doesn't get along with that one, that one is jealous for some reason of another one, but nothing that advances any action or seems to mean anything in the big picture of the book.
In short, if you want to read a novel - whether it is a story of an unhappy middle aged person who lives in a city or a more traditional one about people who grow in relationship to one another or even a novel intended to be a tour through a particular time or space - this is not going to do it for you. There aren't any characters here, no development, no deep looks into time or space. It's like having a "conversation" with an only child of doting parents who can't stop talking about himself and can't imagine any other subject worth a moment's attention.
And yet... The ideas really are compelling and seem sound. The Beck/Wilber division of human consciousness into a series of stages ranging from the barely self-aware to the transcendently conscious seems exactly right as does the searing indictment of the narcissism and intolerance of our prevailing middle brow culture, the legacy of the 1960s that has all but destroyed everything that it can paint with the label of elitism - classical music, traditional literature, high art, history as a study of humanity's attempt to overcome limitations, etc. If you can read past the goofiness, stilted dialogue, and absent characterization, you will find a powerful set of ideas and a compelling explanation of why our society is in such an intellectual muddle and how we can find our way out.
Of course you will have to read past more than goofiness. As can happen in Ken Wilber books, there are some solecisms. Thus we get to read about building bridges where others dug "motes" ("moats" was probably intended) and we have one of the stick figures tell us that DNA testing showing that 40% of the convicted rapists didn't do it means that the women who brought charges weren't really raped and were claiming spurious victimhood even though the real meaning of this number is only that the wrong perpetrators were identified, not that the rapes never happened. It will doubtless console the women who have been raped and who have identified the wrong perpetrators to know that in Wilber's view, the rape never happened.
And Wilber has bought into tort reform propaganda, that subset of urban legends created by insurance companies and corporations who would rather hold onto money than pay it to those that they and their insureds have injured, so that in his view the tort system is really about fakers who have claimed that they lost their psychic powers in car accidents, etc. not seriously injured people forced into lawsuits because they have no other way to deal with the problems created for them by the carelessness of others. My experience in this regard is different from his but we all have to judge things the best way we can.
With all this silliness, is this a book worth reading? Emphatically yes. It does two things supremely well. It exposes the shallow and deadly narcissism of the baby boom generation and the horrible damage it has done to our academic, cultural, and political structures. It also lays out a powerful and coherent framework of human cultural and individual development.
A novel of ideas can be better done than this one as Ayn Rand, among others, showed, but ultimately it is the ideas, not the novel that will compel the attention of readers. This is a seriously flawed novel but has ideas (although not all of them) that we ignore at our peril. If we are not to perish as a society under the kudzu of boomer narcissism and anti-intellectualism we need to become aware of the subtle and pervasive danger that boomer mentality poses to our society. Nobody has presented this better than Wilber does here and so this book, for all of its many and egregious faults, must be read and taken seriously. And, truth be told, it's an easy and compelling read for all its silliness. If only Wilber had spent a little more time and attention on it...
Although the book says that it has footnotes on a web site, they weren't there when I checked, although there were some interesting "sidebars" in which "characters" from the novel pontificated on matters that they didn't get to in the novel itself.
Rating: 
Summary: Bringing Wilber Down to Earth
Review: Wilber is really making a valiant effort with this book. It's a groundbreaking work on all kinds of levels, and is definitely worth a read for all kinds of reasons which have already been mentioned. The thinking behind Boomeritis, in my humble personal opinion, was this: the core theme of Wilber's life work is about the evolution of "consciousness" - or in a less jargon-ish phrase, the evolution of the human soul. But ironically, his message is tough sledding - very intellectual, abstract, and difficult to grasp for most readers, and Wilber is smart enough to know it. But, he still naturally wants to spread it to the masses, because it's obviously an important message. So his plan with Boomeritis, then, is sugar-coating and wrapping that message in a hopefully-entertaining story, sprinkling the occasional graphic sex scenes throughout, in the hopes of keeping readers' attention and "tricking" those who otherwise wouldn't sit still for his message into "getting it." Another effort that seems to be working along similar lines is LiveReal.com, a promising web site I've run across. Overall, this whole effort reminds me of a fifty-year marriage - the impressive thing isn't necessarily that it was done with incredible grace or precision, but that it was done at all. This might sound mean to say and does not in any way convey any disrespect, but Wilber comes across as an older guy who has spent a lot of time studying and learning the lingo, trends, and hip-talk of a younger crowd so that he might fit in and communicate with them. In other words, he comes across as an outsider who has learned very well how to seem like an insider, instead of being an actual insider. In other words, a real drawback to Wilber's approach is that, unfortunately, he is not actually part of the younger crowd he seems to be aiming for. He seems very eager, almost desperate at times, to get his philosophy across to a GenX/GenY audience and to make it seem "cool," but unfortunately enough, he seems to has little idea how his message actually comes across to people on the streets outside of his small circle of spiritual intellectuals. Most folks tend to take a superficial view of Wilber and dismiss him either as New-Agey (although he actually spend much of his energy exposing the flaws in New-Age thinking), or even more ironically, as an abstract intellectual whose all-encompassing work on human nature is largely irrelevant to real life. Wilber tosses around words like "subjectivism" and "positivism" while most people in real life are grappling with down-to-earth problems of relationships, addiction, depression, etc. People are few and far between who care about the "evolution of consciousness," but those who care about Britney Spears, making money, impressing their peers, and finding sex are everywhere. This is why I do feel that Wilber and LiveReal are moving in the right direction. Another example - Wilber gets infatuated with certain ideas - such as the idea of "downloading consciousness" into AI technology - where most other people just don't. Wilber thinks that this premise is compelling enough to build a plot on, but honestly, my feeling is that this idea strikes most people from the start as fairly absurd. So again, Wilber's work is a fascinating work and deserves to be studied and researched on all kinds of levels, but I get left with the feeling that Wilber has broken into new territory that will be traveled more thoroughly and skillfully by those in the future who will follow his lead.
Rating:
Summary: The perfect summer novel for that eco-tourist vacation
Review: Wilber rides post-modernism like Pecos Bill rides a cyclone. He uses a rattlesnake for a clothesline, and after washin' all the dirty coveralls of stinkin' thinkin' from the past 40 years, he hangs them out to dry. He drains self-inflation from them mean-spirited boomers faster than 'ol Pecos drained the Rio Grande. Then, when the day is done, he unwinds on the porch with his mountain lion, in One Taste with the setting sun. For those that get it, no explanation is necessary. For those that don't, no explanation is possible.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant work by America's most intelligent liberal
Review: Wilber truly has written the great postmodern novel here - a novel of ideas that implicitly rejects and undercuts its own premises! This piece of work places a world-historical view of America's current spiritual/social development in terms of Wilber's own "theory of everything." The ultimate conclusion: all America's current cultural problems are caused by -liberalism! Except Wilber calls it the "green meme". This whole conclusion is brilliantly laid out step by step throughout the narrative.
It is absolutely fascinating to see a genius like Wilber wittily describe point after damning point rejecting liberalism, his own current ideology, then agree with those facts - and yet never quite realize that he is refuting his own belief system in his own novel! Truly contradictory enough to be postmodern, and a psychological death knell for American liberals. If the smartest one of them has begun to doubt and reject these beliefs - how long before the rest follow? This novel is truly a portent of things to come in the American psyche.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely brilliant
Review: Wildly intelligent, amazing, sexy, funny, outrageous, full of important ideas, coy; this book is just amazing in its integral depth, swirling philosophy, and incredible analysis. But beware - if you don't know Ken Wilber's work you may find it incomprehensible. If this isn't the upward spiral, spiritual path, or whatever, I don't know what is. Pilgrim's progress as well as boomer's progress. Ken is once again proof that he is the Enistein (hic) of consciousness, or maybe the Jim Carrey of consciousness, or both, or whatever.
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