I really enjoyed this book. The chapter on the marathon was a bit overdone.

This was a really fun read. McGrath presents a well-researched snapshot into a specific time of American history, with so many great anecdotal examples along the way. I would recommend it highly to anybody considering reading.

The economic upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s are difficult to capture all in one book, but the author did a very good job in this medium-length book. Recording the Yuppie era tracks the extreme economic changes of the times themselves, in this very well-researched and-documented book. Highly recommended for anyone who lived (and worked) through the 1980s, or who wants to learn about the era,

The title drawed me in & the story kept me intrigued.

Triumph of the Yuppies 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.