FROM BARNES & NOBLE EDITORS
New York Times columnist David Brooks describes On Paradise Drive as "a work of comic sociology." In Bobos in Paradise, the author scrutinized a new class of people who sought to be both spiritual bohemians and rich bourgeois. This book, now in paperback, postulates that we are a nation of overachievers who have lost all sense of balance and proportion. We live in huge houses we rarely inhabit; we "improve" our kids too much; we overenthuse and we overindulge; and we value our careers at the expense of all else.

FROM THE PUBLISHER
Take a look at Americans in their natural habitat: guys shopping for barbecue grills, doing that special walk men do when in the presence of lumber; superefficient soccer Ubermoms who chair school auctions, organize PTAs, and weigh less than their kids; and suburban chain restaurants, which if they merged would be called Chili's Olive Garden Hard Rock Outback Cantina. Are we as shallow as we look? Many around the world see us as the great bimbos. Sure, Americans work hard and are energetic, but that is because we are money-hungry and don't know how to relax.
But if you probe deeper, you find that we behave the way we do because we live under the spell of paradise. We are the inheritors of a sense of limitless possibilities, raised to think in the future tense and to strive toward the happiness we naturally accept.

On Paradise Drive, at once serious and comic, describes this distinct American future-mindedness that shapes our personalities and underlies our beliefs.

Bobos in Paradise:
The New Upper Class and How They Got There
Author: David Brooks
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group
March 2001

FROM THE PUBLISHER 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.