Rating: 
Summary: All spin, almost no substance
Review: I was hoping for some witty, thought-provoking social commentary, and while there are witty patches in this book, ultimately it seems that Mr. Brooks doesn't really want to be a wry or thought-provoking. In fact, he doesn't really want to be an observer. He wants the upscale car, the Viking range, the prime parking spot. He wants to go native, he's a bit too enchanted with and simulatanously envious of this "new" upper class society. He lacks a Tom Wolfe's breadth and ironic detachment or a P.J. O'Rourke's ability not to take himself too seriously. His prescription at the end sounds off-key and trite. This book has the feel of a Starbucks Latte, something you've paid a bit too much for that's a lot of froth and doesn't last.
Rating: 
Summary: Witty, funny, accurate, worth reading but incomplete
Review: Referring to Paul Fussell's book "Class" published in 1983, the class David Brooks is describing is the generation X, born from middle class and upper middle class parents who moved to Upper middle and Upper or remained at the same position. In the terms of Eric J. Hobsbawn, the Age of Empires, they correspond to the 1890-1914 german bourgeois class called Bildungsbuergertum, those who accessed bourgeoisie through diplomas by opposition to the besitzbuergertum (owners of capital).If they did invade the turf of the Establishment, Establishment did not disappear but became out-of-sight just like the sun can be hidden by a cloud but does not cease to exist. So it is an excellent and funny reading about Upper class and Upper Middle Class and does describe accurately what Top-out-of-sight and other classes might encounter when entering the corporate and cultural business world. I really enjoyed it.
Rating: 
Summary: Brooks lets them off easy.
Review: This is a too superficial book on a vital and long-neglected topic - contemporary class analysis. Norman Podhoretz and others in the sixties taught us alot through their class analysis at the time, and their explanations on the rise of the New Class sixties-types. The nineties was the decade of this new elite, as it was during the nineties that the new elite reached influential middle age:- writing for the New Yorker rather than a campus rag, arguing before judges as attorneys rather than before policemen as protestors, etc. Unfortunately, after about 30 years of silence on this topic, Mr. Brooks declines to give it the serious thought it deserves. He also is far too easy on the Bobos. This is to be expected, unfortunately, from Mr. Brooks, as he has distinguished himself recently as a "conservative" pundit who is more than willing to argue on TV and in his magazine, The New Standard, that conservatives are rather wacky, and that the New York Times-reading elite are not so bad after all. As Mr. Brooks has taken up the Kevin Phillips / John McCain tactic of being "conservative, but not evil like all the rest of them" it is no accident, comrade, that this slim volume is more bouquet than brickbat. Mr. Brooks seems to feel, for example, that the Bobos combine the idealism of the "bohemian" and the practical virtues of the "bourgeois", when one might just as easily argue that the Bobos have jettisonned the bohemian's idealism (now that everything is supposed to be "ironic") and retained only his bitter dystopian affect (the "in-your-faceness" of the still-continuing Decade of Ugliness) while emulating the bourgeois' worst aspects (greasy-pole-climing ambition; keeping up with the Joneses) and sneering at old bourgeois values such as rationality and civility.
Rating:
Summary: An Interesting Book or Two
Review: "Bobo" is author David Brooks' acronym for a Bourgeois Bohemian, a synthesis of Reaganism and Woodstock, the folks he says are running the country today. Bobos are new money--the meritocracy of smart folk who have become rich as fast-track professionals, clever enterpreneurs, start-up capitalists, or visionaries like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Some Bobos are capitalistic hippies and some are mellowed-out business people; Bobo is their common meeting ground. True to their mixed heritage, Bobos love oxymoronic concepts like "sustainable development," "cooperative individualism" or "liberation management." Reconciliation is their middle name. Bobos dislike showing off, but of course all rich people do, so they are allowed to show off in discreet ways. Mercedes are out, but SUV's are in. Jewelry is out, but eco-tourism is in. Bobox buy the same things the rest of us do (bread, chicken, coffee) but pay from 3 to 10 times the mass-market price in search of something better, organic, or more planet-friendly. In fact, anything that shows one to be a friend to the planet is fair game, no matter how silly. There's even a toothpaste that encourages germs to leave the mouth. Needless to say, it takes a huge income to be a true Bobo. Brooks almost had this reviewer feeling sorry for the poor U. of Chicago professor forced to live on a "mere" household income of $180K, barely enough to cover private schools for her kids and a nanny. The wretch suffers from what Brooks calls "status-income disequilibrium" or "SID" because her pay, while handsome, pales before her similarly educated peers in the professions and business, with whom she has to socialize at symposia. America teems with the newly rich. Bobos are most easily spotted in "Latte Towns" like Madison, Wisconsin or Northampton, Massachusetts. Ideally, such venues have "a Swedish-style government, German-style pedestrian malls, Victorian houses, Native American crafts, Italian coffee, Berkeley human rights groups, and Beverly Hills income levels." That's where you'll see the businessman wearing hiking boots patiently explaining 401(k) plans to the aging hippie who's making a killing selling bicyles, or software, or sandwiches. Brooks is at his best describing the furbelows and follies of Bobo-dom. But Bobos in Paradise is really two books in one. Massive amounts of this text could have been computer cut-and-pasted from a work called something like American Intellectual History: 1955-2000. Sometimes Brooks maintains a light tone (without being truly funny), sometimes he is merely factual. I really didn't need to hear three times how tendentious the old Partisan Review gang was back in the fifties. I didn't really need to hear how a Bobo should act on a political chat show (smile a lot and be positive). I didn't really need to hear how TV has coopted intellectual life (that process began in the fifties with J. Fred Muggs and Steve-a-reeno, before most Bobos were born, and it was dealt with much better in the book Nobrow, anyway). Don't get me wrong, the funny parts of this book are quite funny, and for that reason alone I'm giving it four stars. If it had been consistently funny and satiric I would have given it five. I came real close to giving it a three because the slow stretches, while not inaccurate, did little to further the author's thesis. If you intend to write pop sociology, better to write first-rate pop sociology than second-rate academic sociology. One point to ponder is whether the term "Bobo" will catch on. In 1945 no one had heard of a "Highbrow" and in 1980 no one knew what a "Yuppie" was. And there were plenty of columnists who said that we didn't need such words, yet they became coin of the realm anyway. If it strikes you that your local rich people are starting to act like a fusion of Richard Gere and Bill Gates, or Al Gore and Jerry Garcia, then maybe the Bobo moniker might just cover them all. Hopeless trendoids, take note and read this book before the inevitable paperback edition.
Rating: 
Summary: Through the Looking Glass... or rather, In the Looking Glass
Review: An excellent book, a great idea, and pleasantly lighter in its cultural theory leanings than, say, Jean Baudrillard. I haven't ever laughed at myself as much as I did when I read the following: "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?" I have and do, in fact, and one of the members of our design team dons the aforesaid goggles daily. Really. I, too, am guilty in my own right however, fond of organic coffee and organic milk to go with it, as well as clunky running shoes in neutral colors (with which I don't do much running, particularly when playing with Photoshop). I just didn't know how amusing my behavior was until now. My lord, I've been successfully categorized.
Rating:
Summary: Informative and Enjoyable
Review: I have not read as widely as I would have liked and have never taken a sociology class but I am interested in our society and recognize excellent writing when I see it. David Brooks describes the new upper class in America with insight, grace, and intelligence. He supports his thesis with quotes and examples from literature, philosophers, social critics, the New York Times, and the movie The Graduate. He also describes the transformation of Wayne, Pennsylvania, where he attended high school, into a Latte Town as he shares his perceptions of the rich in America and delivers what he promises in the title of his book, especially "how they got there". I found myself smiling and nodding in recognition of things my friends do in San Francisco, Alameda, and Berkeley that are Bobo traits that Brooks describes so accurately, such as taking adventure vacations and eco tours, owning a restaurant size oven, and working for companies that share their values. This is a book worth reading from cover to cover to experience a fantastic, engaging, and delightful word picture of the new upper class.
Rating:
Summary: BOBO? MISSES THE POINT
Review: The author misses the point. He seems to think the society page of the NY times means something fundemental to our society. Perhaps at one time there were a few of the self absorbed who did matter to society as a whole, but most of those folks just don't. The real BoBos aren't Harvard MBAs. They are the techies who are starting changing the economy. Peter Druker has it right, it is the KNOWLEDGE WORKERS who are emerging as the dominant class. The author is too fixed on the people who count their money, write their contracts, and sit on their boards. The New New Thing, is a less flawed book, and shows a real BoBo, who never saw the inside of elite cirles as defined in this book...just changed our society and economy while becoming a billionare.
Rating:
Summary: A great magazine article ... an uneven book
Review: I bought the book after reading David Brooks' similar article in the NY Times magazine on Bethesda, MD a local suburb. I thought the article was great and Brooks by writing for the NYT knows his audience is the group being profiled. The book takes this funny social commentary on America's meritocracy but awkwardly intersperses it with dry academic citations. Brooks never seems to decide if this is witty satire or a serious academic observation and it is a combination that doesn't always work.
Rating:
Summary: Bobos in Paradise
Review: If you have ever shopped in Restoration Hardware,long for the "simple life",like texture in your fabrics,this is for you.This book is a hilarious,snide,and deadly accurate look at a social phenomenon.I had been to virtually every location in the book,and ended up laughing at myself as well as the book.This is a fast read,and superbly observed
Rating:
Summary: Paradise Found
Review: "Something is happening here and you don't know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?" --- Bob Dylan I'll tell you I sure didn't until I read this book. If you want to know "what it is," this book is for you. Imagine you're really having a "Dinner with Andre," or Spalding Grey is really there in the flesh, sitting right across the desk from you but with all of the theatrical effects punctuating his very best lines. Wouldn't you love to be entertained while you're being edified? Read this book! David Brooks takes a clear, intelligent, and brutally funny look at who is setting the tone for society and defining the age we live in. He tells us where they came from, who they are, and why they do the things they do. He's pinned it to the wall for awhile, a breezy and blistering summary written in a friendly, engaging style that reminds me of a good game of Rollerderby. Visualize a cross between Steve Martin and Thorstein Veblen, Max Beerbohm and Jacques Ellul, Gary Snyder and Geoff Marcy, Jack Kerouac and (well, you get the idea). You'll have it nailed for a moment, too. This book made me laugh, it made me cry. I don't want to spoil your fun or tell you the ending, but David Brooks delivers an important message disguised as clever social commentary. I know I must read it again soon.
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