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

Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you work for one of those visionary software companies where people come to work wearing hiking boots and glacier glasses, as if a wall of ice were about to come sliding through the parking lot? If so, you might be a Bobo.In his bestselling work of "comic sociology," David Brooks coins a new word,Bobo,to describe today's upper class -- those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation.

David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and a commentator on NPR and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He lives in Washington, D.C.