Triumph of the Yuppies: America, the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation

Vaulting ambition, passionate consumerism, and a business culture that threw workers under the bus are among the achievements of the yuppie generation, according to this penetrating study. Journalist McGrath (MTV) charts the trajectory of the “young urban professional” cohort who protested in the 1960s, “found themselves” in the ’70s, and went to Wall Street in the ’80s. Their impact, he notes, was far-reaching: they gentrified America’s cities with chic restaurants and shops, driving up rents; fetishized luxury brands and artisanal foods like Cuisinart, BMW, and Perrier; forged a self-congratulatory concept of success by flaunting their advanced degrees and endless work hours; and embraced Ronald Reagan’s vision of unfettered corporate capitalism. McGrath hangs his analysis around portraits of colorful personalities like Jerry Rubin, a former lefty radical who started a company that hosted business-networking parties, and barbed accounts of the yuppies’ oft-satirized quirks, from their dreary jargon to their reflexive crassness (“I’ve got a fast-track career.... And now I need a faster-track relationship,” he quotes one saying as he dumped his wife for a coworker). He also reckons the cost of the yuppie-administered 1980s economy with haunting profiles of rust belt towns like Youngstown, Ohio, that lost millions of manufacturing jobs. It’s a beguiling look at an era that inaugurated an ever-widening rift between a self-satisfied elite and a resentful working class. (June)