All day long I judge books by their covers. All day long. Sorry kindergarten, it’s just got to be done.
So, in that vein, I judge this book awesome:
How great is that cover? Drawn on a bar napkin with a chewed up red straw underline? Come on.
The book is a new graphic novel collaboration between author Jonathan Ames and illustrator Dean Haspiel. It’s the story of Jonathan A., “a boozed-up, coked-out, sexually confused, hopelessy romantic” novelist. Entirely fictional.
Ames is fun. My acupuncturist likes him. (Hmmm… He also loves that Kingsley Amis book about booze. Maybe I should bag this store copy of The Alchoholic and try to get some needles in trade.)
Haspiel is great, too. He did the art for Harvey Pekar’s The Quitter a few years back, and a bunch of the American Splendor stuff before that.
This is a hot book, people.
Kevin Phillips is best known as the former-Republican-strategist-turned-Republican-critic author of American Dynasty and American Theocracy. In his latest, Bad Money, he looks at the decline of the manufacturing base and the rise of specualtive finance, and why it spells doom for our economy in this global era.
Charles Morris, a former banker and journalist, saw the coming crisis in 2005 while he was running a company and decided to investigate its roots and eventual effects once the credit markets collapsed. The Trillion Dollar Meltdown is the result of his research over the last three years. He is tough on both Wall Street insiders and government officials (especially Alan Greenspan).
Investigative journalists Paul Muolo and Mathew Padilla take an upclose look at the subprime mortgage lending debacle to try to follow the process of how this market collapsed, and assign blame to those who caused it. Although they find that many different players all take a slice of the blame, the largest goes to the Wall Street firms that bundled these loans and sold them off, with an especially detailed look at mortgage giant Countrywide.
Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, offers an economic primer for average middle and working class Americans who are worried about the current state of their country, and their finances. Crunch is in an easy to read format, with questions and answers based on common questions laymen have on the economy.
My final pick is not necessarily a book aimed just at the current US crisis, but is an exciting new book that takes a broader look at global capitialism. Chang, global economist and professor at the University of Cambridge, offers an alternative look at globalization, arguing that poor Third World nations are being forced into trade practices that the rich First World nations never practiced, yet benefit from. 
