"Richistan" is a travelogue like none other you've read

"Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich"

by Robert Frank

Crown, 277 pp., $24.95

Welcome to Richistan.

It's a land where butlers make six-figure salaries because demand is so high, and where super-rich kids learn how to manage wealth by applying cost-benefit analysis to a lemonade stand. Robert Frank is the guide for a thought-provoking, entertaining, sometimes eye-popping journey into this fast-growing segment of America.

Never before have so many Americans gotten so rich so quickly, says Frank, the first Wall Street Journal reporter whose full-time beat focuses on the new rich. He begins the journey with questions: Who are all these people? How are they getting rich, why is it happening, how is the wealth changing their lives — and how is it changing life for the rest of us? The answers are intriguing.

Frank backs up his conclusions with plenty of data, but this is no dull tome. The descriptions make Richistan easy to picture: the mansion where towels and staffers' uniforms are all adorned with the house's own logo. The man who says his 100-foot yacht feels like a dinghy in the shadow of pleasure crafts like Paul Allen's $250 million Octopus, which stretches more than 400 feet and has its own submarine. The 30,000-square-foot house with an ice rink and a gabled cottage for the Zamboni. The Mercer Island home with an indoor saltwater pool and a $40 million price tag.

Together, the data and the colorful anecdotes create passages so telling that readers will want to say "Wow, listen to this ... " to anyone within range.

Frank is occasionally derisive — the title of one chapter, "Barbarians in the Ballroom," hints at what he thinks of a clash between new rich and old rich — but the details of life in Richistan can be so ludicrous that his approach generally doesn't feel unfair.

Frank takes readers into a world where the wealth seems to come almost overnight. Ed Bazinet, for example, sold his company that makes miniature ceramic villages and ended up with a fortune worth more than $100 million. "The river of cash flowing around the world is so large that it's spilled into areas of the economy that most of us have never even heard of. For all the talk of flashy dot.comers, celebrities and Wall Streeters, many of today's Richistanis made their money from arcane, oddball products," writes Frank (not to be confused with Robert H. Frank, a professor whose book about rising inequality and the middle class will be published next month).

Richistanis, as Frank sees them, are tireless innovators who don't stop working just because they've made millions or billions. If they're not doing business deals, they're turning their creative approach toward redefining philanthropy and politics.

Among some of the new rich, politics is seen as another form of philanthropy. Rather than spending cash on campaigns that would help preserve their wealth, Frank writes, the super-rich are often spending to advance agendas that tend to be liberal. He points out that while many of the wealthy are Republicans, many of the superwealthy are Democrats who made their millions in such "liberal knowledge capitals" as Seattle. (Among them: Former RealNetworks executive Maria Cantwell, who spent $10 million of her own money in her 2000 Senate race.)

Some people benefit from their proximity to Richistanis — the well-paid household help, for example. But "much of America is being left behind," Frank writes. The growing gap between the super-rich and the rest of us can affect everything from our role in the political process to the quality of our health care as Richistanis abandon the system.

Will Richistan ultimately have a positive influence on the world because its citizens will decide to use their money wisely and altruistically? Or will the new rich misuse their political power and tempt the rest of us into trouble with their love of living large? That's for readers to weigh, but meanwhile, the journey through this land is certainly an eye-opening one.

Kris Gilroy Higginson is the news editor for The Seattle Times.