Third World America

The author--creator of the popular Web site "The Huffington Post"--lays out a doom-and-gloom scenario, backed by a myriad of statistics and personal anecdotes. The conclusion: We are a nation suffering from severe economic anxiety. Unscrupulous banking, crumbling infrastructure, and outright greed are contributing factors, she believes. Coleen Marlo's narration is evenhanded, except when she reads first-person accounts from frontline victims of unemployment. In these intermittent stories, she lends an empathetic tone. They give brief emotional breaks from the exposition on the grave crisis gripping a massive group of Americans. In the end, some grassroots recommendations are offered as both writer and narrator deliver the main point: We are a society that needs to make caring a priority over greed. M.B. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine