A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren

Warren weaves together her life story with an analysis of what is wrong with the country’s economic system. Raised by an Oklahoma maintenance man and a telephone operator, she went on to become an expert in bankruptcy law, a Harvard professor, a White House assistant who helped design the Consumer Financial Protection Board, and a senator from Massachusetts. Her political message can be reduced to four words: the system is rigged. It is rigged in favor of billionaires and millionaires, oil companies, big banks, Wall Street, and lobbyists. It is acutely unfair to the middle class, which is increasingly squeezed economically. The best part of the book is Warren’s account of how the federal government’s response to the Great Recession benefited the very institutions most culpable for causing it, leaving the unemployed in the cold and homeowners with underwater mortgages.