If I had one book to recommend right now, it would have to be Simon Schama's chronicle of the French Revlution “Citizens”. It really is an important read because of the way that the US has come to closely resemble to idiosyncracies of Ancien Regime France.  When you read this book around the same time as you reread "A Tale of Two Cities", you really begin to get an idea of what a complete nutbag turn a revolution can take.  

The aristocracy that was so blatant in 17th and 18 century France has as its analogue here in the US a hidden upper class of wealth and prestige which has spent the thirty years since the “Reagan Revolution” solidifying it's perquisites and power. Reagen told them theat Gordon Gecko was right. Milton Friedman created an ersatz intellectual basis . Bill Clinton, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin drove a stake in the heart of the American middle class and set up the looting of the country by a class swollen with wealth and self-importance.

Now, I am not saying that the working class in the US has anything like the misery and the grinding poverty of the French peasantry, but I think that what we have to deal with here is the loss of percieved prerogatives, relative loss of wealth and status, and the blatant disregard for their complaints by a disaffected majority.