In addition to being wonderfully written, Invisible Hands tells the story of the wealthy businessmen who campaigned against Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and built a coalition of both big and small businesses to influence Washington.īuy Invisible Hands: Amazon | Barnes & Noble Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade Against the New Deal by Kim Phillips-Fein It’s also “just so much fun.”īuy “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”: Amazon | Barnes & Noble Scott Fitzgeraldįitzgerald’s classic short story, about an old-money family who made their fortune selling their hoard of diamonds, “is really a fable about America and money,” according to Mayer. “We thought nothing was happening that much at the time, other than sideburns and disco,” Mayer says, “but actually, it all began in the ’70s.”īuy Winner-Take-All Politics: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Winner-Take-All Politics tracks the origins of extreme income inequality in the United States to deregulation in the late 1970s. Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class by Jacob S. Each covers a different era of 20th-century America, from the Jazz Age to the New Deal to the 1970s. Mayer’s most recent book, Dark Money, covers the billionaires funding extreme right-wing politics, so when it came time for book recommendations, she picked out three more books about how money came to control American politics. Even so, on this week’s episode of The Ezra Klein Show, Mayer said that she doesn’t think of herself as an investigative reporter: “I don’t think it’s different It’s taking longer, but doing what every reporter ought to be doing anyway.” She worked with Ronan Farrow on the story of the Eric Schneiderman sexual assault allegations, which led to Schneiderman’s resignation. She’s written books about Clarence Thomas, the war on terror, and the Reagan presidency. Ezra Klein calls Jane Mayer “one of the really great investigative reporters of our age.” As a writer for the New Yorker, Mayer has delved deep into major political stories, covering powerful men like Robert Mercer and Mike Pence.

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