Living in Oklahoma City, I couldn't resist this one and it's paid off as a terrific read.  Mark Singer is a regular contributor to the New Yorker.  He's also an Oklahoma native, and this book chronicles a very specific Oklahoma contribution to THE political and economic hallmark of he '80s: the S&L collapses.

This is the story of the Penn Square Bank (whose echoes can be heard in Enron's story), a shopping mall based oil and gas broker in OKC.  Penn Square Bank's bankruptcy and dissolution set in motion a chain of bank failures and economic catastrophes reaching well outside the boundaries of Oklahoma.  At the time, as the federal government contemplated bail-out plans for various banks, some economists speculated that the collapse of Penn Square Bank -- located between the Peanut Hut and Brookstone's at Penn Square Mall -- might destabilize entire national economies in South America.

While the subject matter is finance and banking, the prose is smart, sharp, hard-hitting.  Scary as the subject is, even the author has to stop and laugh occasionally at the story's villains -- men who would have failed out of clown school as hard as they failed at running a bank.

As usual in these financial cautionary tales, the losers are always the little guys -- small investors and regular people who packed lifetimes worth of savings into what they believed to be a reliable bank, only to see it vanish in the space of days when the dominoes started falling.

Highest possible recommendation.  A quick and worthwhile read.