The Age of Selfishness

Starred review from February 23, 2015
This work is both a highly effective example of graphic nonfiction and a strong critique of the connection between Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism and the 2008 financial collapse. Cunningham (Psychiatric Tales, How to Fake a Moon Landing) tackles this essential but byzantine subject with admirable clarity. The book examines how the attitudes and approaches of people—including former Federal Reserve Chairman and Rand disciple Alan Greenspan—helped establish the conditions for a worldwide financial meltdown. Financial institutions, sub-prime mortgages, and overwhelming greed did the rest. Although Cunningham is dealing with complicated economic matters, he is able to use straightforward panel arrangements and a simplified color palette to make the financial crisis accessible to the average reader; a detailed bibliography at the end shows the level of research. This book is a superb example of how powerful graphic nonfiction can be in taking complex events and making them frighteningly clear.

April 15, 2015
Cunningham brings his blunt drawing manner, resembling both historic labor-movement cartooning and streamlined 1950s advertising art, to bear on the fairly familiar theme of how Soviet Russian fugitive Ayn Rand nearly ruined the global economyand still may, though not directly, of course, but rather through the acolytes she attracted with her free-market-economics romances The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Her most important disciple was Alan Greenspan, for decades chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank; others infested politics and business. From Rand's career, Cunningham proceeds to the crash of 2008, which resulted directly from the kind of deregulation of banking pushed by Randian free-market ideology, and then to an overview, beginning in the mid-1960s, of the actuality of the Age of Selfishness, which began in earnest in the regimes of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Cunningham's presentation of the crash includes concise explanations of the financial gimmicks that fueled it, and the distinctions he draws between conservative and leftist conceptions of economic fairness are both cogent and clear.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)