Name: Bobos in Paradise
Rating: 4.2 (5 reviews)

David Brooks

vid Brooks

A guide to bourgeois bohemianism describes the social class' attitudes towards consumption, business, intellectualism, pleasure, spiritual life, and politics.

The New Upper Class and how They Got There

Bobos in Paradise

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. 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.

The New Upper Class and How They Got There

Greg Talbot

"Forget it Jack, it's Lattetown" - Returning to the U.S. after four years abroad, David Brooks begins to pen cultural observations on the new elites attitude in 2000 - a mixure of bohemiam 1960s cultural and the 1980s bougeouise. In the chapters here, Brooks details the New Establisment's attitudes toward education, consumption, business life, sex, spirituality and poltics. The bobos, an affectionate and demeaning word to describe these elites, are "an amorphous group of meritocrats who sharea s consciousness and who unself-consciously reshape institutions to accord with their values. (p.44). Brooks gets both preachy and long-winded at times. It's not that he's wrong...if anything his writings about the power dynamics of the status power and income power seem like the writings of someone with extensive knowledge in these worlds. It's just there is an element of snobbery in the snobbery he describes: "But the intellectual has to drive down to her university neighborhood in Hyde Park. She has to zip past the menacing housing projects, and when she returns to her neighborhood at 47th street, she finds herself waiting at a spotlight looking over a yellow check-cashing place and a storefront operation that offers low phone rate to El Savador." Maybe my sensitivity and rejection to the tone is simply because of the recent poltiical shakeups lately. The inequality that Brooks touches upon in the book has only magnified over the last 16 years. Any addendum to his book will have to address the social media revolution which has radically changed how we connect. Also, I was most turned off by Brooks lame spiritual narrow mindedness. "Bobos tend to feel a little surge of moral satisfaction if they can drop their church or synagoguge attendance into a dinner party converastion. It shows they are not just self-absorbed narcissists but members of a moral community." (p.243-244). Guess i'm just too sensitive to that kind of cynicism. Overall any interesting topic...but Brooks continually hits that one note. Readable, tolerable....may help you identify some self-centeredness in yourself to alter...but may just piss you off too.

Bobos in Paradise The New Upper Class and how They Got There

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