The White Album by Joan Didion

The panic and dread of an upper class observer with extreme sensitivity and need for control.

A fundamentally conservative person living in a time of rapid social change, seeing only disintegration.

Much of her writing is so good that you forget that what she's actually saying is bad. Bad as in either incorrect or immoral, and sometimes both.

Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo