(Larger Image)
|
Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (2000-05-03)
ISBN: 0684853779
EAN: 9780684853772
Dewey Decimal #: 305.520973
Hardcover: 288 pages
Edition: 1st
SKU: 00-DBEX-0FJU
Condition: Very Good
Comments: No marks or highlights on text. Dust jacket has very minor shelf wear
|
Editorial Reviews
|
Product Description
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 youthink 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.
|
Amazon.com Review
You've seen them: They sip double-tall, nonfat lattes, chat on cell phones, and listen to NPR while driving their immaculate SUVs to Pottery Barn to shop for $48 titanium spatulas. They tread down specialty cheese aisles in top-of-the-line hiking boots and think nothing of laying down $5 for an olive-wheatgrass muffin. They're the bourgeois bohemians--"Bobos"--an unlikely blend of mainstream culture and 1960s-era counterculture that, according to David Brooks, represents both America's present and future: "These Bobos define our age. They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere we all breathe. Their status codes now govern social life." Amusing stereotypes aside, they're an "elite based on brainpower" and merit rather than pedigree or lineage: "Dumb good-looking people with great parents have been displaced by smart, ambitious, educated, and antiestablishment people with scuffed shoes." Bobos in Paradise is a brilliant, breezy, and often hilarious study of the "cultural consequences of the information age." Large and influential (especially in terms of their buying power), the Bobos have reformed society through culture rather than politics, and Brooks clearly outlines this passing of the high-class torch by analyzing nearly all aspects of life: consumption habits, business and lifestyle choices, entertainment, spirituality, politics, and education. Employing a method he calls "comic sociology," Brooks relies on keen observations, wit, and intelligence rather than statistics and hard theory to make his points. And by copping to his own Bobo status, he comes across as revealing rather than spiteful in his dead-on humor. Take his description of a typical grocery store catering to discriminating Bobos: "The visitor to Fresh Fields is confronted with a big sign that says 'Organic Items today: 130.' This is like a barometer of virtue. If you came in on a day when only 60 items were organic, you'd feel cheated. But when the number hits the three figures, you can walk through the aisles with moral confidence." Like any self-respecting Bobo, Brooks wears his erudition lightly and comfortably (not unlike, say, an expedition-weight triple-layer Gore-Tex jacket suitable for a Mount Everest assault but more often seen in the gym). But just because he's funny doesn't mean this is not a serious book. On the contrary, it is one of the more insightful works of social commentary in recent memory. His ideas are sharp, his writing crisp, and he even offers pointed suggestions for putting the considerable Bobo political clout to work. And, unlike the classes that spawned them--the hippies and the yuppies--Brooks insists the Bobos are here to stay: "Today the culture war is over, at least in the realm of the affluent. The centuries-old conflict has been reconciled." All the more reason to pay attention. --Shawn Carkonen
|
Customer Reviews
|
Comic Social Psychology
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-09-08
This book is a comic look at sociology. David Brooks is one of my favorite conservative thinkers -- he appears during the News Hour on Public TV every Friday night at 6:00 pm. Actually this book is more about Social Psychology than it is about "Comic Sociology".
Sociology investigates how people act in groups.
Social Psychology investigates how people develop as a result of the social influences around them.
This is a funny book about how members of the "Upper Crust" in America are brought up, get married and develop throughout their lives. It's a light funny but scholarly work. The part I like best was a comparison of wedding announcements from 50 years ago and today.
If you like to think about how the Yuppies got this way, you'll love this book.
|
|
Interesting reading
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-09-07
Very interesting take on today's society. Lot's of ideas put in writing that justify what we see going in the world around us.
|
|
Paradise-a-BoBo
Rating  (4)
Date: 2008-07-16
"Bourgeois Bohemians" are the Bobos in the title, a combination of wealth and individualism that melds the ethos of the 80's and the 60's. Brooks traces the roots of the conflict back to 18th Century, and paints a funny and accurate picture of the "paradise" the Bobos have created today.
Brooks' use of the term "paradise" is partly ironic and partly admiring, and as the book was written and published before 9/11, one wonders which way he would lean now.
|
|
Horrible, unsourced, uninformed
Rating  (1)
Date: 2008-06-25
4 out of 4 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book is absolutely horrible. Aside from an almost interesting brief history of bohemia (which was sketchy and obviously tailored to the conclusions the author wished to reach, much like the rest of the book) he simply goes into lauding a caricature of rich professionals and somehow equates that with previous bohemian movements - the equation seeming to be that reading Walden makes you a woodsman, and admiring the Beat Generation in college is the same thing as purposefully leading a life outside of consumer culture. He's trying to sell consumption as art, and doing a rather bad job of even that.
This book, supposedly of a sociological topic, contains absolutely no hard data. Basically it's a way for Brooks to convince himself that he and those around him can buy coolness and authenticity, hundreds of pages to defend replacing artists with lawyers and pretending there's no difference.
If you want something decent about counterculture trends go read either Naomi Klien or Nation of Rebels. If you want something about city trends try American Demographics or maybe Generations. But under no circumstances should you buy this book.
|
|
Witty, Intelligent Observations
Rating (4)
Date: 2008-03-08
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
A funny, and biting, look into how hippie-era bohemians have morphed their youthful, anti-establishment ideals into a new social framework as they have matured. With the onset of the information age, these Bobos have assumed power in business, politics, and religion, reconciling their lifestyle choices along the way.
David Brooks, who ascribes himself to the Bobo class, delivers a book that is gratified with the accomplishments of Bobo culture, critical of its flaws, and hopeful for its future. While critics may point this out as an attempt play both sides of the issue, it is representative of the compromises made a Bobo individual.
Avid readers are sure to self-identify with many of the observations in this book. Your head will nod along in agreement with the passages. At times you'll chuckle, while silently worrying about crass trivialities. But as you sort through the implications, you'll realize that Bobo culture is not too bad.
|
|
|