Taibbi is well suited for such an endeavor a longtime contributor for Rolling Stone - he left this year to start an online magazine for First Look Media - he’s been writing about American political and economic life for better than a decade, especially the 2008 financial meltdown and its aftermath. “The Divide,” then, is - like other recent books, including George Packer’s “The Unwinding” and Thomas Pikkety’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” - an attempt to map the slippage, to identify, through reporting and analysis, just what has happened to America and how it operates.

Rather, he feels “like I’m living that process in reverse, watching my own country fall into a delusion in the same way the Soviets once woke up from one.”

Not that Taibbi is particularly optimistic about such a revolution (of either justice or perception) happening here. Such a landscape, he suggests, brings to mind the last days of the Soviet Union, which operated out of a similar sort of mass hypocrisy until, in 1990 and ‘91, “people were permitted to think about all this and question the unwritten rules out loud, it was like the whole country woke up from a dream, and the system fell apart in a matter of months.” Matt Taibbi begins his sixth book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” with a simple formulation: “Poverty goes up Crime goes down Prison population doubles.” It’s a snapshot, a way to represent what Taibbi sees as the through-the-looking-glass reality of contemporary America, where rule of law has been subverted by, on the one hand, corporate greed and, on the other, a kind of institutionalized abuse of the poor.

The Divide by Matt Taibbi