Putting a modern-day finish on this propensity is “House Lust: America’s Obsession With Our Homes” by Daniel McGinn (Currency, $24.95), which chronicles an epic of satirical, if not quite biblical, proportions.

Mr. McGinn, a national correspondent for Newsweek, focuses mainly on the demand side of the nation’s most recent housing boom-turned-bust. His aim, he says, is to “explore the behavior and psychology that drove the boom — and how those behaviors and psychology helped contribute to the bust that followed.”

Two sets of statistics say it all. First, homes are the most common personal investment. By 2006, some 69 percent of Americans owned their homes, up from only 44 percent in 1940. Second, homeownership has been — at least until the advent of the subprime mortgage crisis last summer — an easy road to amassing wealth. From 2000 to 2006, Mr. McGinn reports, the average price of a home in the United States soared 56 percent.

Add to this a newly overwhelming lust for space. In 1950, the average American home measured just 938 square feet. By 2005, the average had grown to 2,434 square feet. The size of the putative American dream house expanded even more.

At a convention of the nation’s home builders in 1984, an ideal “New American Home” on display encompassed 1,500 square feet and cost less than $100,000. In 2006, the ideal house was 10,023 square fee, and was priced at more than $10 million.