This light-hearted social criticism examines the so-called “educated class,” positing that today’s elite grew out of the hippie flower children of the ‘60s into the money-hungry yuppies of the ‘80s, to ultimately reach an uneasy truce between their conflicting ethos today – to become “Bourgeois Bohemians,” or “Bobos,” for short. This new “meritocracy,” composed of dot-com millionaires, Hollywood producers, pop culture analysts and other members of the “creative class,” has successfully overthrown the old money elite, which inherited their megabucks instead of earning them.

I suspect many readers will recognize themselves in these pages, sometimes uncomfortably so. All the time I was reading the book, I was shopping at Pottery Barn, listening to NPR and searching for a lost spiritual identity in foreign cultures, just as this book posits that most Bobos do. (Of course, I lack the money that these people supposedly have, so I can still feel superior about that.) But the author gleefully admits that he’s a Bobo too, and even though he gently pokes fun at this compromised generation, he is very fond of them at the same time.

The book is amazingly easy to read, for nonfiction, mostly because Brooks approaches his subject with such gentle humor. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Bobo recreation, in which Brooks describes a trek through the a gigantic outdoors outfitters store as if he is climbing up the side of an ice-covered mountain, with the goal of reaching the coffeeshop on the top floor. I also enjoyed the description of the lifespan of an intellectual, the apex of which is described this way: “Books and panels are fine, but in the end, those who are not on television find their lives are without meaning.”