Bobos in Paradise - by David Brooks (Paperback)

About the Book

Once it was easy to distinguish the staid Bourgeois from the radical Bohemians. This field study of America's latest elite--a hybrid Brooks calls the Bobos--covers everything from cultural artifacts to Bobo attitudes towards sex, morality, work, and leisure.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

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.

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

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.