Bobos In Paradise: Summary and book reviews of Bobos In Paradise by David Brooks, plus links to an excerpt from Bobos In Paradise and a biography of David Brooks.
Bobos In Paradise The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Hardcover: May 2000,
288 pages.
Paperback: Mar 2001,
288 pages.
It used to be pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeois worked for corporations, wore gray, and went to church. The bohemians were artists and intellectuals. Bohemians championed the values of the liberated 1960s; the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s.
But now the bohemian and the bourgeois are all mixed up, as David Brooks explains in this brilliant description of upscale culture in America. It is hard to tell an espresso-sipping professor from a cappuccino-gulping banker. Laugh and sob as you read about the information age economy's new dominant class. Marvel at their attitudes toward morality, sex, work, and lifestyle, and at how the members of this new elite have combined the values of the countercultural sixties with those of the achieving eighties. These are the people who set the tone for society today, for you. They are bourgeois bohemians: Bobos.
Are you a Bobo?
Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature?
Does your newly renovated kitchen look like an aircraft hangar with plumbing? Did you select your new refrigerator on the grounds that mere freezing isn't cold enough?
Would you spend a little more for socially conscious toothpaste -- the kind that doesn't actually kill germs, it just asks them to leave?
Do you work for one of those hip, visionary software companies where everybody comes to work in hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a 400-foot wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot?
Do you think your educational credentials are just as good as those of the shimmering couples on the New York Times weddings page?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are probably a member of today's new upper class. Even if you didn't, you'd still better pay attention, because these Bobos define our age. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we breathe. Their status codes govern social life, and their moral codes govern ethics and influence our politics. Bobos in Paradise is a witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age and a penetrating description of how we live now.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
A lighthearted morphology that traces the evolution, mating rituals, and nervous system of a new group of social animals the bourgeois bohemians (Bobos) who arose from the affluent educated class and reconciled the counterculture values of the 1960s to the entrepreneurial energies of the 1980s......Like Tom Wolfe, Brooks can toss off nifty neologisms like Latte Towns (upscale liberal communities, often university-based, that are fueled by gourmet coffee) and Status-Income Disequilibrium (young intellectuals resentment that their income doesn't match their professional achievements). Yet Brooks can neither achieve brilliant comic heights achieved by the observer of radical chic and The Me Decade, nor back his viewpoint with the spine of sharp reporting that informs even Wolfe's fiction.
The New York Times Book Review
The book is a pleasure, simultaneously bracing and comforting, like a sauna.
The New York Times Book Review
The book is a pleasure, simultaneously bracing and comforting, like a sauna.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
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Rated of 5
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