Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for a riveting article that gave visual context to Jeff Bezos’ wealth, Chalabi proves a dab hand both at getting frank admissions from her interviewees about money and using surveys and statistics to put their individual experiences into broader economic contexts. She’s frank about her own situation, too, as she weaves in reports on her own finances (including the ways she divvied up much of the awesome publisher’s advance she got for this project) and records emotionally fraught years struggling to care for her Iraqi parents in the wake of her father’s heart attack and her mother’s stroke. If those latter passages lose the plot and even sometimes drag, her observations elsewhere offer consistently fascinating insights into seemingly diverse topics, from telling correlations between privatized health care and falling life expectancies in the U.S. to the pervasiveness of “money dysmorphia.” In fact, all of her subjects, she writes, admitted to financial insecurity despite occupying household income brackets ranging from virtually nothing to multimillions. The charts and tables she strew freely through her chapters (including one in which she switches to an all graphic format) are likewise engrossing, lit by imaginative designs and graphic elements that ingeniously reflect and enhance the import of the data they record. The author does at last find aid and solace for her personal travails in a large circle of relatives. She closes with references to the pervasive culture of anxiety that capitalism creates. “Capitalism is a profoundly individualizing force that nurtures fear,” she writes. “It teaches us that we cannot support one another or be supported when we need to be. But of course, that’s exactly what we do and what we have to do.”