As I said in my review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, a big part of this book's success in the US can be found in the fact that it is written with almost no style or excitement. Lynn Stuart Parramore at Salon:

To the horror of conservatives, the public is rushing out to buy this weighty economic treatise: the book is #1 on Amazon and has hit the New York Times bestseller list. A public that not only inuits conservative economic nonsense but has the detailed information to back up that gut instinct is just too awful for words.

Piketty is scaring the right because he is a serious researcher and a calm, disciplined observer who writes in measured tones. But for conservatives who have based the last several decades of economic discussion on mythology, this dose of reality has come at them like a chillling blast of Arctic air.

Piketty's writing is plain, readable, and even repetitive. The most daring sentence in Capital, and one that a reviewer at Bloomberg, Clive Crook, was quick to pounce on, is this: "The past devours the future." That sentence, which is on the border between poetry and prose, is the heart of the book. It beats and pumps the life through the its calm and deeply researched 700 pages. The past (the rich) devour our future.