Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America (Spiegel & Grau), by Matt Taibbi

In Griftopia, Matt Taibbi rails at the culture of greed that submerged American society and led to the economic meltdown of 2008. He skewers a mob of malevolent figures, including CNBC’s Rick Santelli (“a half-baked PR stooge”) and the incompetent oracle of Wall Street, Alan Greenspan, tracing the insidious ideology of unrestricted individual avarice to hack writer Ayn Rand (“a bloviating, arbitrary, self-important pseudo-intellectual who recalls the gibberish-spewing academic twits in Woody Allen spoofs”). Name-calling threatens to overwhelm analysis, but Taibbi’s point is well taken: The American people need to work together for their own good, not the profit of shysters with cozy ties to politicians from both parties.