Summary and Reviews of Bobos In Paradise by David Brooks

Bobos In Paradise by David Brooks

Bobos In Paradise

The New Upper Class and How They Got There

by David Brooks
  • Critics' Consensus (3):
  • Readers' Rating (7):
  • First Published:
  • May 1, 2000, 288 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2001, 288 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

Laugh and sob as you read about the information age economy's new dominant class.

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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

Media Reviews

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.

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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked Bobos In Paradise, try these:

  • Hooking Up jacket

    Hooking Up

    by Tom Wolfe

    Published 2001

    About this book

    More by this author

    America's maestro reporter/novelist gives America an MRI at the dawn of a new age: Hooking Up is a book in three parts: one part novella, one part memoir, one part rumination on American life at the turn of the millennium.

  • The New New Thing jacket

    The New New Thing

    by Michael Lewis

    Published 2001

    About this book

    More by this author

    On the wings of Lewis's celebrated storytelling, the reader takes the ride of a lifetime through this strange landscape of geeks and billionaires.


More books by David Brooks
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

  • Book Jacket
    Death at the Sign of the Rook
    by Kate Atkinson
    Jackson Brodie returns in a gripping new mystery! Welcome to Rook Hall. By night’s end, a murderer will be revealed.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    This Here Is Love
    by Princess Joy L. Perry

    Three people—two enslaved, one indentured—struggle to overcome the limits and labels of their painful shared pasts.

  • Book Jacket

    The Magician of Tiger Castle
    by Louis Sachar

    The author of Holes returns with a magical adult debut about forbidden love and a kingdom on the brink of collapse.

  • Book Jacket

    A Club of One's Own
    by BookBrowse

    Dreaming of starting or reviving a book club? A Club of One’s Own is the essential guide to doing it right.

  • Book Jacket

    Too Old for This
    by Samantha Downing

    A retired killer's secret is at risk when a visitor arrives—her only option? Another murder.

Win This Book
Win All the Men I've Loved Again

All the Men I've Loved Again by Christine Pride

Christine Pride's solo debut explores a woman's love triangle in her 20s that unexpectedly resurfaces in her 40s.

Enter

Book
Trivia

  • Book Trivia

    Can you name the title?

    Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

T T O the T

and be entered to win..