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Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There Paperback – March 6, 2001

by David Brooks (Author)

211 customer reviews

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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? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.
In his bestselling work of "comic sociology," David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today's upper class -- those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation.

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Editorial Reviews

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Janet Maslin The New York Times Delectable...a tartly amusing, all too accurate guide to the new establishment.

Chris Tucker The Dallas Morning News Thanks to Brooks, bobos will join preppies, yuppies, and angry white males in the American lexicon.

Emily Prager The Wall Street Journal Hilarious and enlightening.

Jonathan Yardley The Washington Post Perceptive and amusing. [Brooks] has identified the salient characteristics of this new elite, and he describes them with accuracy and wit.

About the Author

David Brooks writes a biweekly Op-Ed column for The New York Times and appears regularly on PBS's The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and NPR's All Things Considered. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Product details

Paperback: 284 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; First Paperback Edition edition (March 6, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0684853787
ISBN-13: 978-0684853789
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.2 x 8.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 2.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 211 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #75,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #448 in Books > Humor & Entertainment > Pop Culture > General
- #1659 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Sociology
- #4329 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences

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What happens when you fuse "Bourgeois" and "Bohemian"?

September 29, 2017

Format: Hardcover

A fun and generally well-written book that has updated the "Yuppie" generation a major step. Today's real successes, opines journalist David Brooks, are the "bourgeois-bohemians" (or BoBo's) who make long green updating granola values. A BoBo might be an investment counselor to the self-employed successes who work in "latte towns" (think: rich college towns like Northampton, MA) with their German pedestrian malls, Scandinavian government, Native American crafts, and Berkeley-style human rights groups. Or s/he might be a rich business start-up who made a killing selling ten-speeds, hoagies, or yoga clothing in such venues. Although this book is eighteen years old, it's well worth a read.

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Jack

Entertaining work written by a respected social chronicler of American culture

March 18, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

An insightful work of social chronicling, written by an astute, clever, and keen cultural historian. Brooks’ trenchant observations on American culture, particularly from 1980 to 2000, are quite entertaining. Reading this book, I can’t help but think that the author wanted to be a novelist, as his prose is novelistic and at times, downright funny when analyzing the absurdities of social behavior in the United States:

“Universities tolerate tattoos and piercing that would have seemed outrageous in the early 1950s, but they crack down on fraternity drinking rituals that would have seemed unexceptional. We feel less strict with our children, but in fact we intervene in their lives far more than parents did in the 1950s.”

I mean, I work in academia and don’t get it. A guy who wears a tie, smokes a cigarette, and likes to drink at the college pub is more of a threat than someone who looks like he just left a Slipknot concert. And yes, he’s the guy sitting next to your daughter in her “History of Sexuality” class at her private college. So this book resonates with me.

Also, Brooks’ insight on scantily clad women everywhere one looks is hilarious:

“To get a firsthand glimpse of these new codes, go down to your local park in the summertime. You’ll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin-tight spandex pants. […] Women running around in their underwear in public. They’re not exposing themselves for the sake of exhibitionism. Any erotic effect of their near nudity is counteracted by their expressions of grim determination. They are working out.”

The preceding quote is amusingly accurate. It’s like I am reading a Tom Wolfe novel!

He makes several other good points: Americans no longer worship God, really, they worship health and their bodies. (I suppose it is truly a temple, as our Sunday School teachers taught us—before the Protestant decline in the U.S., which Brooks ably covers!) Also, the “intellectuals” today are bit soft—they go to bed early and are more concerned with getting their kids to school and making sure the “I Support NPR” bumper sticker is clean on the Prius—rather than discussing hermeneutics or Jorge Luis Borges, for example, over some whiskey and beer. I mean, it seems the Christopher Hitchens days of drinking and talking all night might be gone.

The text runs a bit long—he could have cut it down by 50 pages or so—and at times his commentary is too exaggerated, but overall this is a book that historians will read 20, 30 years from now in order to understand the pre-9/11 gilded age of the 1980s and 1990s. And yes, I hate to say it, but it is refreshing that Brooks is a moderate, and not completely consumed by political ideology.

Good read.

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A Masterpiece of Social Commentary

April 22, 2012

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

This is a masterpiece of social commentary. Not quite serious sociology replete with regression analysis, but much more than pop history and culture, Bobos in Paradise is a serious meditation on the manner in which the disparate worlds of the 1960's and 1980's have merged, as the radicals of the former have merged with the entrepreneurs of the latter.

Bobos are bourgeois bohemians, though I suppose they could also be bohemian bourgeois. Jerry Rubin famously went from the activist trenches to the world of the investor. The Clintons went from the world of the antiwar movement to the world of the futures trader. While he mentions exemplary cases such as this, Brooks is interested in something far more subtle. By turns humorous, silly and hypocritical, the decisions made by Bobos can also be seen as pleasantly moderate and, in their own way, disciplined and responsible.

Bobos still resist authority but they make exceptions for, e.g., the health of the body. They will not be bothered by activities that would have riled Victorians--women jogging in little more than spandex underwear--so long as they are doing so in an effort to better themselves and preserve their youth and health. They do not countenance materialism that goes beyond the necessary (the purchase of luxury yachts, e.g.) but they are quite prepared to spend tens of thousands of dollars for a double oven with a six-burner cook surface. Gold faucet taps would disgust them but natural-surface slate showers they would see as de riguer. Where the sixties' radicals sometimes confined themselves to a diet that could be purchased by a third world peasant's wages, the Bobos shop at Whole Foods.

Brooks charts their patterns of consumption, their business and intellectual lives, their views of pleasure, their politics and their spirituality. The writing is simply beautiful, the examples by turns hilarious and touching. The book is more readable than any book with its range of reference and seriousness of purpose that I can recall. (It has also sparked a sequel: On Paradise Drive.)

Bobos in Paradise should be paired with Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Both deal with the ways in which educated elites have separated themselves from the poor and both show the ways in which the extremes of the sixties have been transcended by elites while they have nearly destroyed the lives of the poor.

Highly recommended.

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Most recent customer reviews

meilitammie

Relevant, Fascinating, and Captivating

Previous to reading this book my wife had introduced me to the British television series entitled "Downton Abbey" which triggered a deep interest into the topic of...Read more

Published 3 months ago

Donna Packer

Not what I expected. Too much historical background. ...

Not what I expected. Too much historical background. I thought it would focus more on what defines bobos today.

Published 9 months ago

rocks

Insightful. BoBos should read. Lots of them out ...

Insightful. BoBos should read. Lots of them out there.

Published 10 months ago

woahhally

Three Stars

Good quality book for university sociology course. Arrive on time and as described

Published 11 months ago

JustinHoca

Helps explain the backlash against the meritocracy in the election of 2016

I listened to this book on a long holiday drive at roughly the same time I finished reading JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (2016).Read more

Published 1 year ago

Barry Rucker

Poor

We quickly gave away this book to a library.

Published 1 year ago

Clifford w. Perry Jr

One Star

It is more appropriate as a sociology book in college.

Published 1 year ago

Anne

If you're a Boomer this is a must read!

A totally enjoyable book. Great look at Baby Boomers and how they continue to change the social, political and economic situtation in US.Read more

Published 1 year ago

Rebecca_K

Three Stars

So much proto-hipster shade... and still somehow relevant in 2016.

Published 1 year ago

philip moss

Funny, insightful

Funny, insightful. A short cultural history of American elites from the 1950s to the 1990s and a critique of modern manners and mindsets.Read more

Published on May 11, 2016

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