Bobos in Paradise
The New Upper Class and How They Got There
(amazon)David Brooks (View Bio)
Hardcover: Simon & Schuster, 2000; Paperback: Touchstone, 2001.
"The self-loathing yuppie is dead! Long live the Bobo! An absolute sparkler of a book, which should establish David Brooks — not that he need establishing — as the smart, fun-to-read social critic of his generation." — Christopher Buckley
"The new Dodge minivan is named the Kerouac. Maynard G. Krebs brokered the AOL/Time Warner deal. They're selling Amway products from Ken Kesey's Magic Bus. This is much worse than the sixties. BOBOS IN PARADISE is cool, mean, and excellent." — P. J. O'Rourke
"The most delightful dissection of the brainy classes since A. C. Spectorsky's THE EXURBANITES 40 years ago." — Tom Wolfe
"The editors recommend...BOBOS IN PARADISE...This deep look at the democratization of hip is a learned and mordantly funny treatise." — San Francisco Chronicle
"Put on your REI hiking boots, climb into your Range Rover, get your mocha at Starbucks, and dive into this book to find out why you're a Bobo and why you're so happy. David Brooks is one shrewd, thoughtful, and immensely entertaining social critic. He has sharp eyes, a tough mind, and a richly ironic understanding of how we live now and why. Read, weep, ponder, and laugh." — E. J. Dionne Jr., author of WHY AMERICANS HATE POLITICS
"Delightful...[A] funny-yet-perceptive look at...the way we live." — The Houston Chronicle
"David Brooks's delectable new book...with gleeful wit and bull's-eye accuracy.... 'Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural 60's and the achieving 80's into one social ethos,' Mr. Brooks surmises in a book that merrily explores the implications of that claim.... A thoughtful as well as entertaining social critic.... BOBOS IN PARADISE offers a tartly amusing, all too accurate guide to the new establishment and its self-serving ways." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times
"David Brooks has written a smart, funny book...He writes incisively and hilariously...Sharply observed and entertaining." — Chicago Tribune
"Briskly written, clever...David Brooks astutely describes a new-ish American elite." — Los Angeles Times
"An appreciative, witty survey of the ways in which 'the bohemians and bourgeois have co-opted each other'...Up to now, the Bobos may have been oft discerned, but ne'er so well atomized." — The Atlantic Monthly
"A breezy stone of a book that skips along the surface hitting all the right waves." — Boston Globe
"[I]ntelligence and nearly pitch-perfect humor...a mixture of heartfelt fondness and a dead-on ridicule, animated by an energetic, glass-half-full ambivalence.... The book is a pleasure, simultaneously bracing and comforting, like a sauna. Bracing because it should make hypocritical, self-satisfied Bobos cop to their complicated hypocrisies and self-satisfactions. And comforting (to Bobos) because it says their cultural imperium will endure. 'In truth it is hard to see how the rule of the meritocrats could ever come to an end,' Brooks says. 'The meritocratic Bobo class is rich with the spirit of self-criticism. It is flexible and amorphous enough to co-opt that which it does not already command.' As flexible and self-critical — and, at best, as funny and smart — as BOBOS IN PARADISE." — The New York Times Book Review
"[H]ilarious and entertaining." — Emily Prager, The Wall Street Journal
"[B]reezy, well-argued.... The book offers gentle fun, not an angry screed. Indeed, upon completing BOBOS IN PARADISE, one's only regret is that the book is only 284 pages long." — USA Today
