I could not put this book down - an absolute powerhouse of cultural history. I appreciated the way in which McGrath not only brings his analysis across many different facets of American culture, but in the way that he deftly sets up comparisons between the ideal of Yuppiedom in places like NYC, Seattle, and Chicago with the on-the-ground reality in Youngstown, Ohio and upstate New York. The connection to the present day for the end of the book is an underline to his point -- greed was never good, but we certainly believe that it is.

I've always had this nagging feeling that I live in the dust of some great thing which has very recently become unserviceable. We all live with creeping unease about "the state of things". There is an increasingly visible difference between the way painted faces on our screens talk about America and the way it actually is. No longer maintained is the veneer which conceals a rotting imperial corpse slowly eating itself.
This book documents the activities of boomers after they finish college. Referred to as yuppies, short for young urban professionals. As a group they psychotically decide to strip the copper out of America's walls because they want money instead of a functional society. Half a century later they all live in mcmansions and their legacy is to have turned America into a strip mall parking lot.

I found this book to be a thorough and tightly written examination of a pop culture phenomenon that I missed by being born to two non-Yuppies in the early 90s.

<I>Triumph of the Yuppies</i> is about the sub-generational, er, clade of the Yuppies, as rising out of the Boomer Hippies and going on to preside over culture for a few years of the early eighties. The thesis here is that it arose out of economic conditions, which was a feedback loop on social ideas about economics. I do not think that the book does a good job of supporting its thesis, but falls upward in doing so.

In reviewing my review, I worry that it may come off sounding harsh, so clearly stated I really like this book. It feels like required reading for anyone under 50.

I do think that there is a general case for the author's idea, but this book is much more history of the 80s, and more a sociological study than a history. The scope it intends to connect about and around Yuppies is broad, which limits its level of detail - take a drink every time you think 'this paragraph could have been a book on its own'; a double if you already read that book.

The style of the book is academic, by which I mean the opposite of sometimes how that word gets used and that the writing is clear to the point of dispassionate. It is generally well-cited, and a lot of the book comes off to me more as sociology than history, reporting on the words and values of who considered themselves Yuppies. It may commit the sin of which it accuses the Yuppies in the sense that it focuses upon their values as an ideological thing, ignoring the practical of what is going on in areas of US culture that does not have the same attention, but I don't really see that as a solvable problem. Again, it is more like the other book that pairs with this one, rather than what this one must shoulder.

Overall, a very cool history and I hope a sign of more similar books to come because I think that there is a lot of value in modern political discussion about these facts, and seeing the development of various aspects of modernity, to think about different ways that it might be approached.

My thanks to the author, Tom McGrath, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.