A good book about the financial crisis is...

...A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of '08 and the Descent into Depression, by Richard A. Posner. Posner is a judge, of all things, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He's also been closely associated with the University of Chicago's philosophy of free-market capitalism. In this book, however, Posner turns critic and calls for more government regulation.

A Failure of Capitalism is especially good for the layperson, as it is written in easy-to-understand English.