• Nonfiction. By Sara Davidson. Random House, $25.95. Grade: B-

Book in a nutshell: Why have just a personal midlife crisis when you can call your problems a Generation's Crisis and write a book about it? Twenty-five years after Davidson gave voice to her peers with her self-revelatory ode to baby boomers, Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties, and after a career as a successful TV producer and writer, she was a woman who suddenly couldn't get work, have a civil conversation with her teenager or hold on to her once-doting younger boyfriend. She asked: What's my purpose now, in my 50s? What will I do with my energy and skills for the next 30 years?

As she takes measure of her own life, Davidson relates numerous inspiring stories from boomers who adopted a child, started a nonprofit theater company or moved to a golf course. Copious interviewees include old friends, new friends in Boulder (where she moved), celebrities such as Andrew Weil, career coaches and researchers on aging.

Best tidbit: Davidson and her close friends, many also single, discuss living together as they grow old - and whom to invite to their community ("Some geezer version of fraternity and sorority rush?") . While this appealing idea harkens back to the freewheeling communes of the '60s, it's really about companionship, she says.

Pros: Davidson lays out the myriad challenges facing the nearly 75 million-strong boomers and looks at healthy, productive ways they are confronting aging and change.

Cons: Leap! is a mile wide and an inch deep. Davidson sets us up for her own "surrender" to a passion without ever delivering. I wanted to tell her to stop taking notes already and look inside! In India, when other volunteers' coldness finally prompts her to wonder whether she's a "selfish, willful, demanding, intrusive bitch," she probes no deeper. The solution to her own midlife crisis apparently only lasted until she turned in this manuscript.

Final word: Read Davidson's treatise for amusement or inspiration, then heed one boomer's simple advice: "You don't have to figure it all out. Pick something and do it."