Product Description

It used to be easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture, but now the "bos" are all mixed up and it is impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappucino-gulping banker. In attitudes towards sex, morality, leisure and work, it is hard to separate the renegade from the company man. There is a new establishment which has combined the counterculture of the sixties and the achieving eighties into one ethos. These "Bobos" define our age. This book is an essay on the cultural consequences of the information age.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #152971 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
You've seen them: They sip double-tall, non-fat lattes, and chat on mobile phones while driving their immaculate SUVs to Pottery Barn to shop for £25 titanium spatulas. They tread down speciality cheese aisles in top-of-the-line hiking boots and think nothing of laying down £4 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 our 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 anti-establishment people with scuffed shoes".

Bobos in Paradise is an American-focused, but 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 analysing 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. 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

About the Author
David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a contributing editor at Newsweek. Formerly a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, he's had articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications.

Customer Reviews

Holds up a mirror to the educated "class" in modern society.
"Bobos" stands for "Bourgeois bohemians" - according to David Brooks, to be a member of the new élite you need to be highly educated and/or talented but also to demonstrate your social conscience and anti-materialism at the same time. This is how the contemporary élite is trying to improve on the élite of the last generation - somehow balancing the striving ambitious attitudes of the 1980s with a 1960s-style desire for fun, love and human values. Although you're unlikely to laugh out loud while reading this book, it is quite funny in places, partly because it is so true to life. Even though all the examples relate to the USA, those in the UK and the rest of Europe will surely recognise that a big element of "Bobodom" has arrived on our side of the pond too. If you have a demanding career, yet are uncompromising on ethics and collect African and South American gewgaws like they're going out of fashion, preferably acquired on an adventure holiday-cum-charity project in a far-off corner of the world, then this book holds up a mirror to you. Find out how your life and that of many others have become so full of bizarre contradictions.

A fine book
I thought this was one of the funniest and most astute books on this area of study for many a while. Brooks pokes fun at Bobos but in a gentle, rather friendly way. He actually finds some of them rather admirable, if a little silly at times. He admires the genuine hatred of racial and sexual prejudice, for example, and the desire to soften the hard corporate edges of capitalism by embracing a libertarian ethos.

He also notes how the modern Bobo business executive actually works longer hours than some others and the cynic might conclude that Bobo culture is a way to make hard-driving American capitalism more acceptable to the masses. But if people are genuinely enthused by their jobs and prefer to drink latte instead of martinis, who is to say this is wrong?

Most Bobos are us. And as Mark Steyn once remarked, some of the American passengers on board Flight 93 who overcame their hijackers were "Bobos" on the sort of definition that Brooks gives us. Truth is, that we may eat organic vegetatables and read Jane Jacobs, but that does not mean that this generation is any less capable of bravery than the so-called Greatest Generation.

Definitely recommended reading.

Humorous Satire of the Educated Elite's Aspirations
You get two books for the price of one here. The overall book explains how the social elite was transformed from old family, old money lineage to a mass elite based on education and social values. David Brooks isn't sure he likes the new elite, and lampoons them as savagely as Swift did the English aristocracy. Whether or not you agree with his criticisms, the material is often very funny and could serve as a comic's monologue.

His point is a subtle one that many will mistake. He is describing the arrival of an educational elite as the reigning class. Those who are older will get the Bohemian part of Bobo -- they've all seen pictures of the Village in the 50s or read On the Road.

It's the other "bo" that will confuse some people about this book. It stands for Bourgeois. To Brooks, Bourgeois is concerned with all the classic middle class values -- income, savings, uprightness, proper appearance and behavior in public, and hard work. Elites have always wanted to be set apart from those values, even though they might have to espouse them in public. So it's interesting that this new elite is connected to these values.

His thesis is actually pretty good. In these politically correct times, educated people have been conditioned since that first preschool class to look down on traditional patterns of the rich and powerful. When they, in turn, become rich and powerful, they want to have a little fun with it, but have to put on a social mask to make that fun acceptable. A variety of things work in this context: being environmentally sound; politically correct; and not having any connection to a status symbol of the old elites. Naturally, it's a cynical view that all of this is posturing. I'm sure that most of what people do is actually based on their own firm values about having a healthier, more open, and environmentally safer world.

One of the funniest parts of the book for me was how status and money play off against one another. It's okay to make a lot of money, but you have to do it in a noncommercial way to be esteemed. A writer can have a best seller about ecology and have high status, while a script writer for a James Bond movie might make 100 times the money and have very little status. Despite enjoying the humor, I'm not offended by that result.

The connection from where we were in the 1950s and earlier is much too long, and isn't really very necessary. The fundamental contradictions of the current lifestyle of Bobos has to be funny to almost everyone, including the Bobos.

The book could have done a lot more to talk about how the fusion of the two sets of ideals could be made better for all concerned. Hearing about the meetings of the leather-clad people to do B & D soon becomes tiresome. Surely all of this energy can be directed into something more wholesome!

Perhaps the funniest story in the book was about the woman who builds her dream house in Montana, and the Grim Reaper calls. I won't spoil it for you, but be sure to read that section near the end.

Enjoy . . . even if the humor is at your own expense! Learning to laugh at ourselves is a great lesson.