The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life
by David Brooks (Allen Lane, £20)
In his first book Bobos in Paradise, US political commentator David Brooks took aim at the “bourgeois-bohemian” lifestyles prevalent among America’s upwardly mobile classes. “Bourgeois-bohemianism” denoted the marriage of the counter-cultural 1960s with the Reaganomic consumption of the 1980s, whose combined fruit, in Brooks’s portrayal, was an ugly love-child characterised by selfish, hypocritical materialism.