A winning lottery ticket represents the American Dream in its simplest form: a big pile of money and no immediate obligations. In other words, total financial freedom. The question is how best to express that freedom: Go on a shopping spree? Give to charity? Invest? Start a business? Go back to school? The first book by the host of National Public Radio's irreverent investment show Marketplace explores the options for a sudden windfall, as delineated by newspaper quotes from lottery winners. In a series of 10 road trips, David Brancaccio travels to Las Vegas and Wall Street to talk to different kinds of professional gamblers, attends a conference on socially responsible capitalism in the Grand Tetons, and talks to community investors in Hawthorne, Nevada. He learns about Save For America in Seattle and the Small Business Administration's SCORE program in California. He hunts for homes in Levittown, New York, and sits in on a retirement-center planning session in Tucson. At each stop, he plays the part of the nouveau-riche ingenue, meandering quixotically through the area harvesting anecdotes, grilling the locals on their financial methods and reasoning, and letting them sway him toward their pet schemes, then running the numbers afterwards to see what he might stand to gain physically, morally, or economically. His faux naiveté and punchline conclusions can be glib and self-obsessed, as when he explores the complex depths of rampant consumerism primarily by denying himself a cinnamon bun at the Mall Of America. Still, Brancaccio goes further than most financial planners simply by admitting that there's more to having money than making more money, and his blatant subjectivity and open-minded air of exploration make Squandering Aimlessly personable as well as informative, sort of a Pilgrim's Progress for the surplus-era social set. The book may be more useful for sparking fantasies about sudden wealth than it is for assisting serious fiduciary decisions, but it packs a lot of information into a small space without sacrificing its refreshing humanity.