This is a most unusual, entertaining, and appalling collection of essays by a National Book Award-winning author about the fraction of one percent who hoard most of the wealth in the United States. And goofy title aside, it is one compelling read. It caused me to reflect upon the dichotomy when I wandered the streets of Kathmandu, Nepal, in the mid-1970s as a nearly broke hippy traveler, while speakers in every restaurant and tea shop on Freak Street were blasting out the hit song “Money” from The Dark Side of the Moon album by Pink Floyd. It also caused me to envision extreme wealth as a malignant disease, not unlike cancer in the flesh, which corrodes a person’s humanity, causing blindness to the needs of others and deafness to the cries of those in need.

The book is broken into three sections: “The Rewards – How to Spend It,” which describes what the mega-rich do with their money, “The Mechanics – How to Keep It,” which delineates the elaborate schemes the mega-rich concoct to avoid sharing their wealth, and “The Perils – How to Lose It,” which provides case studies of some of the mega-rich who got caught acquiring and keeping their wealth in nefarious ways.

To me, the most unworldly and fascinating is the first part. It opens with a look into the building, buying, and selling of gigantic yachts that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. There is an entire business subculture devoted to this uniquely ostentatious hobby available only to the world’s richest people. They really get into it too, to the point that they compete with each other while obsessed with a ridiculous “mine’s bigger than yours” mentality. As I read about how some of these people behave, I found it hard to believe that we lived on the same planet. As they compete to construct larger and larger pleasure-craft, are they really unaware of the millions of people who can’t afford homes and don’t have enough food to eat? How can they possibly justify such extravagant waste? They should take a tip from MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest women, who is devoted to giving away most of her fortune to needy organizations. When you think of how much they cost to construct and maintain, yachts are truly the ultimate symbols of garish excess.

Another essay is devoted to the super-rich as survivalists. As the wealth gap widens, more and more rich people become frightened. However, rather than attempt to help fix the problems for us all, they spend their money on elaborate schemes to ensure their own survival. As Osnos writes: “Fear of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But elite survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.” And he quotes Stewart Brand, the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog as saying: “As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the larger circle of empathy, the search for solutions to shared problems.” The rich are content, though, to build their elaborate bunkers and palaces in isolated areas to which they can flee and wait out the apocalypse that is decimating the rest of us.

Yet another essay shines a light on the mega-rich trend of hiring famous entertainers for their private parties, sometimes spending hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars for celebrities such as Beyonce, Rod Stewart, Jennifer Lopez, Steely Dan, and the Rolling Stones. A panoply of musicians are more than willing to do private gigs, fully realizing that the payday can far surpass the payday from concert performances.

There is a lengthy overview of Mark Zuckerberg and the moral compromises he allows at Facebook, which concludes with the challenge: “The question is not whether Zuckerberg has the power to fix Facebook but whether he has the will… He succeeded, long ago, in making Facebook great. The challenge before him now is to make it good.” Osnos also highlights Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest suburbs in the country, in which financial scandals abound, and its surrender to extreme conservatism. This article in particular includes a litany of moral compromises. In a piece that delineates how the super-rich hide their wealth from taxation, the author points out that “scholars of wealth and taxes say that the golden age of elite tax avoidance has contributed to the turbulence in American politics, by hardening social stratification; reducing public resources for education, health, and infrastructure; and eroding trust in America’s mythologies of fairness and opportunity.” He uses the Getty family as an example of hoarding inherited fortunes at any cost, and adds: “In their current condition, taxes on American wealth are, effectively, on the honor system, with opt-outs for the flagrantly defiant.” And most of those who accrue massive fortunes are defiantly me-first.

In the last section of the book, Osnos focuses on those who got caught breaking too many rules while enriching themselves. However, those who serve time for white collar crime are not the very richest, but rather those trying to climb the ladder of greed and gain in an attempt to reach the top. They are aided, in fact, by the U.S. legal system, which tends to turn a blind eye on the crimes that the wealthy commit. As Osnos writes: “The Supreme Court has continued to limit the scope of prosecution for white-collar crimes.”

Reading this is like taking a tour of a fantasy world in which far different rules of morality apply. If you wonder why our society has become so stratified, why it is so difficult to afford a home and food and education and recreation, why the American dream has got so far out of reach, this book supplies some of the answers. It clarifies that those at the pinnacle of the wealth pyramid did not get there because they were smarter or stronger or nobler than anyone else, but rather because they were the most rapacious, greedy, selfish, and amoral. In fact, many of them inherited their wealth, but once they acquired it, they became determined to hold onto it at any cost. With few exceptions, they are not worthy of your admiration. Your pity, perhaps, and even your contempt, but not your admiration. The great tragedy is that people such as these have bought their way into positions of power, although they are in no way worthy to wield such power. Through this book, Osnos becomes an iconoclast, shining a spotlight on the inadequacies of the super-wealthy; in this essential task he meets with praiseworthy success.