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Summary: A Vomitious Logical Fallacy from an "Educated Elite"
Review: Davey's book is interesting to read if you so desire to know what today's elites think of themselves.
Worth the while to discover the pompous delusions that these new upper class members hold of themselves: that they have reconciled counter-culturalism with ambition, among countless other irreconciliable things. Or that they are the "Educated Class", superior because of their formal educations compared to previous ruling classes. Perplexing how they ignore their utterly blatant hypocritical ways of life. Or even the fact that there is no mention of the role that class, gender, and race issues still greatly impair one's potential for equality in this nation. And Davey even mentions George W Bush in a good light... wow, absurd, but Davey's serious.
Reading such drivel is educational, so if you want to know what the new ruling class thinks of themselves (they're creative, intelligent, enlightened, ethical, environmentally friendly, and liberal, right?), Davey vomits it out self-assuredly here.
Oh, and Davey, there has been no reconcilliation. To believe in class equality means accepting the easy choice of rejecting the multi-million dollar life and actually working for wages like the majority of the nation.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent... but needs an amendment or two
Review: This was a really good book, I had to read it for my History of the US since 1945 class, it's funny and rings true in many aspects of this culture that I would fit my parents into, for the most part. But it was published in 2000, and we all know a lot has changed since then. For instance, he claims that talking about foreign affairs is a taboo --- and that people basically aren't partisan (as far as the BOBOS go). I think he's wrong in both regards, and I think it would be interesting for him to update his book with a post-sept. 11 edition.
Rating: 
Summary: The first three chapters are enough
Review: While this book is incredible--the characterizations of the American upper middle class are both identifiable and suitably backed up by endnotes--it gets a little repetitive. The chapters are quite long, and they all have the same theme, so I actually think each chapter could stand alone. I recommend reading the first two or three chapters and then moving on with your life. By all means don't read past chapter four, because the last three chapters, which deal with "Pleasure," "Religion," and "Politics," are not only redundant in their themes, but also much weaker, less cohesive, and have less "I know just what he means!" cache than the first part of the book.
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Summary: The age old human race
Review: David Brooks penetrating mind and humor combine for a delightful reading experience.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting? Yes. Brilliant and visionary? Probably not..
Review: While the book was heralded as visionary when it was released, the tragic events of 2001 have turned it into a more interesting case study on American society than it ever could have been before. With the economy still in some wing of the hospital ward, and with war yelling in our face, society has probably regressed a mite from the Gore-ian Bobo wonderland that David Brooks describes rather colorfully. Restoration Hardware, perhaps the personification of Boboism, is currently trading at nearly zero. Unfortunately for Brooks and I would imagine Restoration Hardware as well, time has not served his theories well -- a more distant perspective and the unfortunate intrusion of reality lends itself to noticing the cracks a bit more readily. To put it all within a fancy linen, so to speak, "Bobos In Paradise" basically describes a so-called American modern society that has adopted the "rebel" as mainstream. In this case, though, the rebellion is not something one may find in the "horrors" of gangsta rap and hip/hop -- although, truthfully, having Maureen Dowd write in the Old Gray Lady about Eminem is something Brooks might point to with glee -- it is driving an SUV to Target, buying fancy coffee, and sleeping with the Ralph Lauren designer pillow covers. He claims this kind of worldly American elite comes from the melting pot of bohemians and the bourgeois. And I would propose he claims wrongly. Is our society really becoming sort of high-cultured paradise or does "Bobos in Paradise" merely detail gilded American avarice? If such culture has now come to exist in America, based on our commingling of rebellion with high-minded thought, where is the innovation? American materialism is all to its own, well and alive, and this is where Brooks fails to create a truthful mirror of the American elite. Does our materialism come from the bourgeois Benjamin Franklin, who Brooks calls prudent and frugal? Or the Bohemians, which Brooks castigates as showing "contempt for the conservative middle classes?" These questions are left unquestioned and resolutely unanswered. Under which theory do Americans spend millions of dollars on their kids Playstations, their own over-priced BMW 3 series cars, perhaps extravagant trips and perhaps reading their Marx, as Brooks never fails to point out, and still have absolutely no firm idea of how to move the world forward? The author wisely shields himself from further criticisms by deeming this long-form book as merely "observations." And indeed that's simply all it is. But even as the observations do make sense -- Eminem starring in the NYT Editorial Page, Apple praising the "rebels" in an effort to push product, as somehow buying an overpriced computer will turn you into Gandhi -- there are some true underlying problems when the real world suffering of Afghanistan intervenes with an Escalade trip to the mall and a Bobo in paradise. Useful in perhaps a different way than he intended and the reviews describe, file this book under the header: gilded age of the late 20th century, according to Brooks.
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Summary: this book is a riot
Review: this will become a classic of social commentary
Rating:
Summary: Written like a conversation with a friend
Review: Bobos was a delight to read. It was written as though a friend was talking to you over a cup of coffee; it wasn't bogged down with statistics and graphs, etc. Brooks ideas were fascinating and his writing style was a pleasure -- I laughed out loud several times. A quick, fun read.
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Summary: I laughed, I cried...
Review: I giggled at the hypocrites described inside. Yeah, the guys in Range Rovers moaning about the rain forest and crying about wage slaves in Jakarta while they look down on the poor slob who schleps out the Pellegrino at their table at Spago. Just another feature of our "you can have it all" society. I recommend this one and a novel called "Only in America" by John Soltez, both of which offer keen looks at urb-suburb Greenwich Village poseurs... they both kept me snickering the night away. This is one to remember the next time you get an attitude from the guy in little square glasses waiting in line for a latte. Freak him out -- order a "doppio" and stare him at him like you just don't care...
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Summary: H. L. Mencken¿s boobus americanus after a TV makeover
Review: Bobos ("bourgeois bohemians") are what come of the Protestant Establishment bedding down with flower children. Bobos are the issue of WASP and Kennedy Catholic, the Left Bank and the Right. Ben Franklin making cozy with Gustav Flaubert. A marriage of Episcopalian and Jew. A prep school Adonis seducing a grad school feminist. (Or perhaps that should be the other way around.) They are what happens to yuppies in the Age of Information. Bobos realize that the bottom line should be done in calligraphy; that six-figures of yearly income ought to buy more than the Wall Street Journal and cappuccino; that there is more to life than vintage port and the society pages. Although Bobos in Paradise is packaged as a satire, and indeed a lot of fun is had with the meritocracy, it is actually an adoration written by a self-admitted member of the new elite. Since it is difficult to satirize your own class, Brooks's satire occasionally lacks bite. But it certainly doesn't lack pizzazz, sparkle, and a kind of "Look, Ma, I'm writing!" effervescence. Bon mots and witty catch phrases ("incidental money," "biscotti-nibbling Bobos," "New Age vaporheads," etc.) roll right off his tongue, or, I should say, spring adroitly from his keyboard. Thus on page 58 we learn that "Gone are the sixties-era things that were fun and of interest to teenagers, like Free Love, and retained are all the things that might be of interest to middle-aged hypochondriacs, like whole grains."
Sometimes we get a glimpse, however, that, although his eye is sharp and his wit keen, Brooks's verbal hijinks lack a certain substance, leading to a failure to convince. Thus on page 90 he writes: "The top-of-the-line fleece outergarments [worn by Bobos] are used for nothing more strenuous than traversing the refrigerated aisle in the Safeway." One thing wrong with this: Bobos don't shop at Safeway. Please. More like Whole Foods or Bristol Farms. Or, on page 20, where he's talking about wedding section photos from the New York Times in the fifties, he observes, "and yet it's not really been so long-most of the people on those yellowing pages are still alive, and a sizable portion of the brides on those pages are young enough that they haven't yet been dumped for trophy spouses." Which means, I guess, that Brooks thinks that a man opts for a trophy wife at about the age of 70. Or maybe, caught up in the pleasing flow of his rhetoric, he doesn't notice when the meaning has gone slightly awry. The book is organized into chapters defining the lifestyle of Bobos. One of the best is "Consumption," that which Bobos do best: conspicuously consume with a vengeance while remaining politically correct. The chapters are padded out a little with reviews of influential books of social criticism, e.g., William Whyte's The Organization Man, Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter-Culture or Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd, a group the author and his book clearly aspire to join. Also excellent is the chapter, "Intellectual Life," in which Brooks focuses on think tank culture and demolishes it. For Brooks, a think tank is where underlings learn how to become intellectuals while going through a "buttboy stage" as they scurry with their stuffed briefcases behind the "front people" of the tanks, tired old icon intellectuals who "walk very fast to demonstrate their vitality" (p. 155). Brooks notes tellingly that if anything happened to the apprentice intellectuals "think tank reports across America would go out filled with typos for months." A chapter on "Pleasure" suffers from Brooks's disinclination to reveal much about the sexual habits of Bobos. Other than to assert that Bobos like their sex healthy, safe and with rules, and that they don't just have orgasms, they "achieve them," Brooks is fairly mum. Whether Bobos do threesomes or prefer third world types for sexual thrills is apparently not known. Work itself is the real pleasure. The chapter "Politics and Beyond" demonstrates that Bobos are a reconciliation of liberal and conservative, a mesh of the politics of the 60s and 80s. They would seem to be moderates, but by page 266 Brooks assures us happily that Bobos have clearly "become conservatives." The chapter on "Spiritual Life" suffers from a kind of free-floating free-good association that Brooks wants to indulge. Bobos don't put down any religion, and in fact like to try them all on for size, picking and choosing from each what is best. One gets the sense however that Bobo heaven is a place where spirituality is expressed by buying, displaying and using politically correct consumer goods and services. Make no mistake, though, this is the kind of book biz coup that we'd all like to have written. It's tasty pablum for those who would see themselves as the ruling class, a massage of prejudices, mores and self-centered delusions that would have amused Dwight MacDonald (author of "Masscult and Midcult," a seminal satiric essay from the fifties) or old H. L. Mencken who liked to shock the "booboisie" with his polemics, as does Brooks. In fact Brooks's Bobos look a little like Mencken's boobus americanus after a TV makeover. Yet there's something reassuring in this fantasy of upper class life in America at the dawn of a new millennium. Sure the power structure has been diluted by women and some unavoidable eggheadism, but by gosh, when all is said and done, it's still the same good old boys who are running the show, upright people from such places as Wayne, Pennsylvania and Burlington, Vermont, people characterized, as their fathers were, by "restraint and sobriety." God's in his heaven and all is right in Bobo Land.
Rating:
Summary: Bahahahaha!
Review: You are guaranteed to recognize yourself and (hopefully only a few of) your friends as well! A good read... and companion to Affluenza.
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