Matt Taibbi

The financial crisis that exploded in 2008 was only a prologue. The rise, fall, and rescue of Wall Street in the bubble-and-bailout era was the coming-out party for the network of looters who sit at the nexus of American political and economic power. The grifter class--made up of the largest players in the financial industry and the politicians who do their bidding--has been growing in power for a generation, transferring wealth upward through increasingly complex financial mechanisms and political maneuvers. The crisis was only one terrifying manifestation of how they've hijacked America's political and economic life. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi here unravels the story, digging beyond the headlines to get into the deeper roots and wider implications. He traces the movement's origins to Ayn Rand and her most influential acolyte, Alan Greenspan; he uncovers the hidden commodities bubble that transferred billions of dollars to Wall Street while creating food shortages around the world; and he shows how finance dominates politics with an inside account of the high-stakes battle for health-care reform--a battle the true reformers lost.--From publisher description.

"Dispatches from the 2016 election that provide an eerily prescient take on our democracy's uncertain future, by the country's most perceptive and fearless political journalist. The 2016 presidential contest as told by Matt Taibbi, from its tragicomic beginnings to its apocalyptic conclusion, is in fact the story of Western civilization's very own train wreck. Years before the clown car of candidates was fully loaded, Taibbi grasped the essential themes of the story: the power of spectacle over substance, or even truth; the absence of a shared reality; the nihilistic rebellion of the white working class; the death of the political establishment; and the emergence of a new, explicit form of white nationalism that would destroy what was left of the Kingian dream of a successful pluralistic society. Taibbi captures, with dead-on, real-time analysis, the failures of the right and the left, from the thwarted Bernie Sanders insurgency to the flawed and aimless Hillary Clinton campaign; the rise of the "dangerously bright" alt-right with its wall-loving identity politics and its rapturous view of the "Racial Holy War" to come; and the giant fail of a flailing, reactive political media that fed a ravenous news cycle not with reporting on political ideology, but with undigested propaganda served straight from the campaign bubble. At the center of it all stands Donald J. Trump, leading a historic revolt against his own party, "bloviating and farting his way" through the campaign, "saying outrageous things, acting like Hitler one minute and Andrew Dice Clay the next." For Taibbi, the stunning rise of Trump marks the apotheosis of the new postfactual movement. Taibbi frames the reporting with original essays that explore the seismic shift in how we perceive our national institutions, the democratic process, and the future of the country. Insane Clown President is not just a postmortem on the collapse and failure of American democracy. It offers the riveting, surreal, unique, and essential experience of seeing the future in hindsight"--

"Are we deranged? The acclaimed Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh argues that future generations may well think so. How else to explain our imaginative failure in the face of global warming? In his first major book of nonfiction since In an Antique Land, Ghosh examines our inability--at the level of literature, history, and politics--to grasp the scale and violence of climate change. The extreme nature of today's climate events, Ghosh asserts, makes them peculiarly resistant to contemporary modes of thinking and imagining. This is particularly true of serious literary fiction: hundred-year storms and freakish tornadoes simply feel too improbable for the novel; they are automatically consigned to other genres. In the writing of history, too, the climate crisis has sometimes led to gross simplifications; Ghosh shows that the history of the carbon economy is a tangled global story with many contradictory and counterintuitive elements. Ghosh ends by suggesting that politics, much like literature, has become a matter of personal moral reckoning rather than an arena of collective action. But to limit fiction and politics to individual moral adventure comes at a great cost. The climate crisis asks us to imagine other forms of human existence--a task to which fiction, Ghosh argues, is the best suited of all cultural forms. His book serves as a great writer's summons to confront the most urgent task of our time."--Jacket.

A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police--from the bestselling author of The Divide

Two backcountry skiers find the body of a young woman embedded in the ice of a remote mountain creek. Identifying her takes no time at all - Abbie Cooper is wanted for murder and acts of eco-terrorism, and her picture is on law enforcement computers all across America. But how did she die? And what was the trail of events that led this golden child of a loving family so tragically astray?

"Working as a correspondent for the New York Press, The Nation, and Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi has close-up access to the Democratic primary for the 2004 presidential election: a seat on John Kerry's campaign plane, a face-to-face encounter with the pancake makeup of John Edwards, enough Howard Dean press conferences to memorize the good doctor's stump speech by heart, and, by way of contrast, a two-month undercover stint working for the republicans in Orlando, Florida. But the closer he gets to the candidates, the more pompous and vapid they appear." "Taibbi fulfills his responsibilities as a serious campaign reporter with frequent bouts of blind panic, sad attempts to cope with drugs, and the donning of a gorilla suit; in addition, as he follows the dog-and-pony show around the country, he forgoes lavish journalists' watering holes in favor of hostels and halfway houses. Such devices allow our protagonist to register, with sharpness and mounting anxiety, the gaping canyon that divides swaths of sane working Americans from the political phonies who purport to represent them."--Jacket.