Rating: 
Summary: What the heck is a Bobo and why should you care?
Review: What the heck is a "Bobo," you ask? And why should you care? Well, no need to look any further; because David Brooks has all the answers for you right here in his book, "Bobos in Paradise," each chapter packed with a seemingly unending stream of witty (and mostly funny, some hilarious) one-liners from a leading Compassionate Conservative Comic Commentator. And certainly there's enough material here to keep several stand-up comedians in business for years. For instance, Brooks' description of the contortions which Bobos put themselves through in an attempt to show that they don't really MEAN to make gobs of money, they're just "creators" who just so "happen" to be insanely successful. Or, his hilarious lessons on "how to be an intellectual giant" (and, ultimately, get on TV, because "those who are not on television find their lives are without meaning"). And much more.... In sum, "Bobos" are the synthesis, in the quasi-Hegelian sense, of the bourgeoisie (the "thesis") and the bohemians (the "antithesis"). So, according to Brooks, we appear to have reached what Frances Fukayama might call "The End of History," the ultimate synthesis and triumph of liberal democracy (highlights include moderation, civility, material success, and peaceful coexistence). And Brooks gives us a fascinating historical synopsis as to how this came to pass. Very interesting stuff, no doubt, but all this leaves ME a little nostalgiac for the day when at least SOME people actually cared PASSIONIATELY about things - art, ideas, culture, politics, the environment, whatever! Now, it's all about muddling differences, Clinton's "triangulating," reconciling seeming oxymorons (i.e, Dubyah's "compassionate conservativism"), and taking care at all times to be PC and not offend anyone. And heaven forbid that anyone be a true PARTISAN (i.e., someone who actually BELIEVES in something and is even willing to fight for it!). A side point: I find it interesting that Brooks - the uberBobo - admires Jane Jacobs ("The Death and Life of Great American Cities") so much, since Jacobs celebrated a thriving URBAN ecosystem as the ideal habitat for humans, while the natural habitat of the Bobos is undoubtedly suburbia, with its soulless subdivisions, "bowling alone" social breakdown and alienation, ugly "big-box" stores, shopping malls, soccer moms, SUVs and minivans. According to David Brooks, THIS (yay, sprawl!) is (apparently) Paradise, although it's not clear how he reconciles this with his admiration for Jacobs. (But Bobos are, if nothing else, good at reconciling things!) In fact, it's not clear how Brooks - or any Bobo, for that matter - can reconcile many of the things discussed in this book. How about the seemingly irreconcilable values of social justice on the one hand, and laissez faire capitalism on the other? Or the values of rootedness/community/faith vs. mobility/personal autonomy/free choice? Or how about being "green" while also owning an energy-inefficient, resource-gobbling "McMansion," a sub-zero refrigerator, an oven that could roast an ox in 10 seconds flat, and a pollution-spewing SUV? Or spending your days working to make money, while not losing your artistic, bohemian soul? Or having fun "responsibly." Or enjoying your demanding, enriching, fulfilling, painful vacation (without, of course, being a "travel snob")? Or dozens of other seemingly irreconcilable values? Good luck! Let me just mention a few other criticisms of this book. First, although David Brooks deluges us with anecdotal evidence, fascinating and entertaining though it is, I don't see any hard facts and statistics (or even interviews) that provide EVIDENCE to back up his arguments. I'm not saying that Brooks is wrong in his observations or conclusions, but as an economist (and scientist at heart), I would have liked to have seen some serious sociological statistics here. Second, although there's little doubt that David Brooks has got the habits of his friends, and friends' friends, down cold, what about the rest of the world? Are the masses of "middle America" (not to speak of the Third World!) really Bobos in any significant numbers? And isn't there a backlash to all this (i.e., the WTO protests in Seattle)? Third, the tone of this book is somewhat confusing. Is this all supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, or is it supposed to be serious sociology? Does David Brooks really think Bobos are more subjects of mockery and comic one-liners, or are they the great hope of mankind? Or both at the same time? It would be nice to know what Brooks REALLY thinks about Bobos. But maybe that's the whole point here; namely, in Bobo-land, noone ever really thinks ANYTHING definitively (so someone can actually claim to be a "Methodist Taoist Native American Quaker Russian Orthodox Buddhist Jew" - ohhhhh). In the world of the Bobos, it seems that everything is dumbed/watered/blanded down, made as unthreatening as possible ("have a nice day, come again!"), compromised, "go along get along." As Brooks himself admits, this is NOT exactly exciting or romantic stuff we're talking about here. So, after finishing this book, I couldn't quite decide whether I agreed more with Stendhal (commenting on the bourgeoisie), that Bobos make me want to "weep and vomit at the same time," or with David Brooks, who believes that "it's good to live in a Bobo world," and also that Bobos have the potential to lead us "into another golden age." Anyway, since Bobos are powerful and apparently may be here to stay for a while, I recommend that you read this generally well-written, witty, engaging book, and decide for yourself!
Rating:
Summary: Humorous Satire of the Educated Elite's Aspirations
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Dem Bobos
Review: Leave it to yet another conservative pundit and reporter for The Wall Street Journal to write a tongue-in-cheek "assessment" of the morays of pop culture. Sure, we all like to think we know how conservatives define culture. Yet the American mass media has done an abysmal job reporting and interpreting the deeper meanings of conservatism's allegiance to what we consider "high culture." If we also stop to recall that "pop" literally overwhelmed "high culture" during the so-called "countercultural rebellion" of the 1960s, conservatism's latest "trip"--i.e. to revaluate and reinterpret its rival's intentions and relevance--isn't all that hard to fathom. Besides, didn't the uberconservative powers-that-be announce to the world three years ago that they were going to turn away from the political sphere and begin to subvert the current culture? Lucky for us, David Brooks' "Bobos In Paradise" is at least an entertaining hatchet job that seems to be an attempt at getting what's out of the box back into it. Purporting to be a serious work of social criticism--which it isn't, not by a long shot--Brooks literally stumbles all over the minefield of stereotypic thinking he's laid for his readers. Regardless of smatterings of validity hidden within one one-liner after another, Brooks' comprehension of popular culture's effects on adult society and the world of the worker-drones is too superficial and too convoluted to be taken all that seriously. For example, Brooks describes a concept--metis--allegedly taken from the ancient Greek by a Yale anthropologist named James C. Scott, to describe the Bobo approach to work. Though Brooks claims it means "practical knowledge, cunning or having a knack for something", anyone can look into the Oxford English Dictionary and learn that "metis" actually means "crossbreed, particularly offsprings of whites and Native Americans, as in mestizo." Which is a funny and telling comparison between two concepts. But...is it a joke? And, if it really is one, is it funny? Besides, a look into any good faculty directory reveals that the only "James Scott" at Yale is a political science professor. A long, long way from anthropology. When Brooks begins to describe the so-called spiritual aspects of "Bobo culture," he marvels at a morality that is "modest in its ambitions and quiet in its proclamations, not seeking to transform the entire world but to make a difference where it can." Further describing this tendency to look at morality in personal terms, he does note that many so-called Bobos tend towards ambivalence when confronted by moral paradox or ethical conflict. But he's quick to defend their solution: Bobos follow the path of least resistance. Which, it seems, is a nice way of telling us that the so-called Bobo culture is comprised of a bunch of cowardly sissies who are too self-centered to act upon their fancied superiority. According to Brooks, politically speaking, Bobos are "unifiers" not "dividers"--which, of course, puts them right into the category of George W. Bush, the first American Anti-President to wage a class war from the top down. Which, as a general statement, is simple co-optation, part of a widely flung campaign to declare the culture wars of the last three decades over and won--a tactic that would thereby brand anyone who continues to wage it from undesirable quarters "an agitator". What's most troubling about "Bobos In Paradise" is its benchmark misconnection: Are we really seeing a meld of the so-called American bourgeoise and the so-called bohemians? That's a pretty questionable assertion. More likely, we're seeing the results of a long-invisible counterculture's rising popularity and its consequent marketing by Madison Avenue. And as for the Bobos themselves? In all probability, they're merely a groundswell of well-meaning men and women who are rich enough to make themselves look and seem like the visible exponents of some sort of new wave in American culture when, in reality, they're simply involved with changing their image and their "market signature." Possessing the trappings--read: products--of a counterculture that has staunchly guarded its non-political nature for nearly 20 years, the people Brooks identifies as Bobos are merely adult versions of the predators who took the 1960s counterculture to the bank. Anyone who has seen what is happening in Austin, Texas--as the dot-com.ers and real estate developers are raising the financial roof on a local and richly spirited counterculture that has been in business since the 1960s--will know exactly what Boboism really means. Perhaps Brooks would have been more accurate had he dubbed his darlings "Buboes." As in plague-welts. Therefore, read this one at your own risk. In other words, this time try not to believe everything you read. "Bobos In Paradise" is a market ploy that is helping Madison Avenue create and widen a new market while beheadding another appendage of the hydra of authentic culture in America. And, you know what? That's even funnier than the first time they did it to us.
Rating: 
Summary: How will the world review this book?
Review: It probably doesn't mean anything to most people, but BOBO in some Spanish speaking countries means silly person or fool. Does this have anything to do with the type of person this book is about? Let the world be the judge of that.....
Rating:
Summary: amusing yet scary
Review: ooooh god I'm one of them! Suddenly you realise, since you like to hang out in Starbucks and buy organic bread from trader joes and think travelling to nepal would be cool....you're a bo-bo. Ihad fun reading about this culture from a sociological perspective. I think the world needs more bobos and latte towns! This is a must read for everyone
Rating:
Summary: An engaging social commentary
Review: David Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise" paints an accurate picture of today's upper class. His analysis of the New York Times wedding announcements, found early in the book, pretty much describes the entire "Bobo" phenomenon. Indeed, it is a phenomenon worthy of examination. That the bohemian and bourgeois cultures have merged is clearly evident in modern America. The days of the preppy bourgeois remain only in Polo/Ralph Lauren advertisements, while any bohemian unwilling to accept the fruits of capitalism and gain no longer exists. Brooks does repeat himself often, and he does get bogged down in his examination of the origins of modern intellectualism. Though the subject matter represents merely a fraction of today's America, the book is very much worth reading as an engaging social commentary. Accordingly, Brooks deserves praise for his efforts to explain the "Bobos."
Rating: 
Summary: Yawn...
Review: I bought the book because the reviews at the time were better. I've decided that I don't care about finishing the book at this point; I've been bored with the so-called 'humorous' analogies that I have heard many times before. The author isn't making any new, incredible observations, he's merely telling us what a short newspaper article has already told us. To sum it up, the book is great if you've never watched prime time television, have never seen a Starbucks, or don't understand what dot-coms are. Otherwise, pass it by.
Rating:
Summary: Funny Insights Makes a Great Gift
Review: David Brooks hits his target -- and often -- in this insightful, often very funny book. His description of today's educated elite is dead-on, capturing our need to reconcile historical extremes into a comforting, soft-edged world. Through deft observation, Brooks manages to place an entire generation into perspective. This is a great book to give to a Baby Boomer, Starbuck's addicted friend. Especially if your friend is in marketing, advertising, politics, sales or owns a business. The insights into today's most active customers will more than justify the cost of the book. Plus, as an added bonus, the book, which is apolitical, helps explain how a George W. Bush could be elected President.
Rating:
Summary: Funny as hell; doesn't realize its ambition
Review: I have only one thing to add to what Newman said, below: another key reason why conspicuous consumption is less derided today than it was in the 80s is because--let's face it--we are living in a more tasteful age. Just go back and watch a couple of episodes of Dynasty, or flip through some glossy fashion mags, or check out the cars . . . In terms of pop culture--song lyrics, and sex and violence in the movies and on tv--certainly things are more vulgar today than they were then. But in terms of things people buy, what they put in their homes, how they dress, and even the way they wear their hair, our era just looks better. At least that's true with respect to the bobos. And since the ultimate arbiters of taste in our society are all bobos, it's no wonder they refrain from criticism.
Rating:
Summary: Lord Byron and a coffee mug - only in Boboland!
Review: May I be forgiven for writing a review before I have finished reading the book? (I intend to finish it soon.) Just need to post a pertinent comment about how accurate this book is. I took a break from reading this book and went to a local store in a national chain of discount stores, although this particular store has been acting a lot more upscale lately. Anyway, I was in search of a coffee mug tree. I found one, and lo and behold, there on the box was a quote from Lord Byron! And the product "line" had a very trendy, Italian sounding name. (Interestingly enough, there was a "Made in China" sticker on the bottom of the product itself...) For one brief moment, the quote from Byron made me feel as if I were purchasing a rare and wonderfully superior product....and I a literary genius for selecting this gem among coffee mug trees....then I recalled what I had read in this book and came back to earth and laughed out loud in the store....to the shock of some of the Bobos nearby, undoubtedly. If this piques your interest, read this fascinating and revealing book. And if you want to read more Byron, get one of his books and don't feel that you are well-read just because you see a quote from a classic author on a consumer product.
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