Fr. 24.90

Bobos in Paradise - The New Upper Class and How They Got There

English · Paperback / Softback

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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. Informationen zum Autor David Brooks is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a contributing editor at NEWSWEEK. Formerly a reporter and editor at THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, he's had articles in THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE WASHINGTON POST and other publications. Klappentext 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. Introduction This book started with a series of observations. After four and a half years abroad, I returned to the United States with fresh eyes and was confronted by a series of peculiar juxtapositions. WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, the bohemian downtown neighborhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99. Suddenly massive corporations like Microsoft and the Gap were on the scene, citing Gandhi and Jack Kerouac in their advertisements. And the status rules seemed to be turned upside down. Hip lawyers were wearing those teeny tiny steel-framed glasses because now it was apparently more prestigious to look like Franz Kafka than Paul Newman. The thing that struck me as oddest was the way the old categories no longer made sense. Throughout the twentieth century it's been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spirits who flouted convention. They were the artists and the intellectuals -- the hippies and the Beats. In the old schema the bohemians championed the values of the radical 1960s and the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1980s. But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn't just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people's attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people, at least among the college-educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together. Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos. After a lot of further reporting and reading, it became clear that what I was observing is a cultural consequence of the information age. In this era ideas and knowledge are at least as vital to economic success as natural resources and finance capital. The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as "intellectual capital" and "the culture industry," come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos. These Bobos define our age. They are the new establishment. Their hybrid culture is the atmosphere w...

List of contents

Contents

Introduction

1 - The Rise of the Educated Class

2 - Consumption

3 - Business Life

4 - Intellectual Life

5 - Pleasure

6 - Spiritual Life

7 - Politics and Beyond

Acknowledgments

Index

Report

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

Product details

Authors David Brooks
Publisher Simon & Schuster USA
 
Languages English
Product format Paperback / Softback
Released 31.05.2001
 
EAN 9780684853789
ISBN 978-0-684-85378-9
No. of pages 284
Dimensions 139 mm x 215 mm x 15 mm
Subjects Humanities, art, music > Education > Social education, social work
Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Natural sciences (general)

Soziologie, Sociology, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / General

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