Yuppies

Offers a portrait of yuppie motivations with more nuance than simple consumerism. – Molly Fischer * New Yorker *
Fascinating…Dylan Gottlieb provides a cultural and political biography of the young urban professional. – Paul Renfro * New Republic *
The more interesting aspects of Gottlieb’s tale are the consequences of financialisation to New York City: a trendy and competitive Manhattan dining culture, a seismic realignment in left versus right politics and even a boom in distance running…[he] tells his story through primary sources — college newspaper clippings, career centre reports — as well as with a handful of character vignettes and first-person interviews. – Sujeet Indap * Financial Times *
A sleeper hit. – Anna Silverman * The Times *
The book is more than a nostalgia tour through the years of Perrier and disco. It chronicles a social and a moral revolution from which America is still struggling to emerge. – Helen Andrews * Compact Magazine *
A detailed, well-researched book that substantiates the yuppie caricature while refusing to treat the actual individuals as cartoonishly evil or self-obsessed. – Chris Arnade * Hedgehog Review *
More than just a shoulder-padded punchline of the Reagan era, yuppies remade American society in ways that we’re still reckoning with today…These ‘consummate entrepreneurs of the self’ engineered neoliberalism, and today’s ‘knowledge workers’ are their inheritors. * Commonweal *
A profile of a notoriously narcissistic, materialistic milieu, a study of how an economic revolution created a culture. – Olivia Oldham * Dissent *
A culturally rich portrait of elite class formation in the midst of a national economic transformation. – Aaron Freedman * Business History Review *
Offers a fascinating, convincing explanation of how yuppyism came about, revealed itself in the workplace and society, and changed the Big Apple and the broader culture. – Andy Smarick * Washington Free Beacon *
A fascinating read for anyone interested in yuppie culture and how the demographic affected New York City, in particular, and the country as a whole. – Amanda Ray * Library Journal *
Readers who wish to immerse themselves in sights and sounds of 1980s New York…will find in Gottlieb a knowledgeable and witty tour guide. – Joel Harold Tannenbaum * Orange Blossom Ordinary *
A most excellent romp through recent New York history. Dylan Gottlieb’s fascinating Yuppies brings to life for a new generation of readers what constituted a proud yuppie existence like my own: an Upper West Side apartment, a Wall Street investment banking job, finishing the New York Marathon, fanatically shopping at Dean & DeLuca. – William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards and Power Failure
A brilliant, important book. Yuppies does something rare and valuable: It makes the 1980s feel immediate and unfinished rather than safely distant. We are still living inside the story it is telling, and Gottlieb makes that unmistakably clear…Outstanding. – Rick Atkinson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of An Army at Dawn
Dylan Gottlieb has given us a brilliant account of the transformation of New York City in the late years of the twentieth century. Original, compelling, and written with wry humor, Yuppies offers a vision of what was gained as well as what was lost in New York through the rise of finance. – Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City
Gottlieb vividly demonstrates how the yuppie was not some passing 1980s trend but a historical phenomenon that radically reshaped our economic, cultural, and political landscapes. If you want to know how we ended up where we are today, read this fascinating, revelatory book. – Paulina Bren, author of The Barbizon and She-Wolves: The Untold History of Women on Wall Street
At last, the social history of financialization has been written. No one seriously studying this period of US history will be able to ignore Yuppies, which will also appeal to general readers. – Jonathan Levy, author of Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States

Dylan Gottlieb is Assistant Professor of History at Bentley University. He is a cohost of Who Makes Cents: A History of Capitalism Podcast and has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gotham, the Journal of American History, and Public Seminar.

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