According to an excitedly penned page in the Spiegel & Grau publishing catalog, Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone writer known for his sharp eye and Homeric taste in similes, has a 288-page book coming out on Sept. 21. The new work from Mr. Taibbi, whom his publishers refer to as “Hunter S. Thompson meets Michael Lewis” and also “the must-read journalist on the current American crisis,” will be titled The Griftocracy.
Without Mr. Taibbi, the world would never have known to compare Goldman Sachs (GS) to a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Along those lines, Spiegel says that his new work will be “the perfect book for this moment in American history: a brilliant, blood-boiling, darkly humorous, and bracingly honest investigation into the hidden mechanisms of power in bailout-era America.” There aren’t many details about what that investigation will look like, although there is mention of “a silent coup d’etat” in “the halls of American financial, political, and media power.” Mysterious!
Spiegel & Grau gets big bonus points for name-dropping the excellent but difficult finance blog Zero Hedge, which along with Daily Kos and Gawker is apparently one of the Web sites who follow Mr. Taibbi’s “every move.”
Amazon already has its price for Griftocracy: $17.16.
If you can’t wait until September, and have already read Mr. Taibbi’s available work, try this amusing and violent Vanity Fair piece on the Russian newspaper Mr. Taibbi used to edit.
