Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich
by Robert Frank
Why You'll Love This
The truly wealthy don't just live better — they've quietly built a parallel country with its own economy, culture, and rules.
- Great if you want: an insider look at how extreme wealth reshapes identity and society
- The experience: breezy and anecdote-driven — reads more like reportage than analysis
- The writing: Frank blends sharp observation with dry wit, never letting envy or admiration cloud the lens
- Skip if: you want rigorous economic argument rather than colorful portraits
About This Book
In the early 2000s, America quietly grew a second country inside itself — a parallel nation of the newly, spectacularly wealthy, with its own social codes, anxieties, and ambitions. Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Frank spent years embedded in this world, and what he found defies easy caricature. These aren't the old-money aristocrats of popular imagination but self-made entrepreneurs from ordinary backgrounds, suddenly navigating a rarefied universe they never quite expected to enter. The real question Frank pursues isn't how they got rich — it's what happens to a person, and a society, when wealth reaches this scale.
Frank's greatest strength is his access, and he uses it shrewdly. Rather than lecturing, he lets the subjects reveal themselves through their own spending habits, insecurities, and surprisingly relatable struggles with identity. The prose is clean and journalistic without being flat, and Frank balances sharp reporting with genuine curiosity about his subjects. The result is a portrait of extreme wealth that reads more like sociology than celebrity gossip — probing, occasionally funny, and quietly unsettling in ways that linger well after the last page.