Ayn Rand - Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

Pros: Includes the chapter "On Racism", which (in the context of Rand's individualism) brutalizes that practice.
Cons: There's no shortcut to absorbing her viewpoint, spread over at least a half-dozen volumes.

Self-beneficial action, in the history of philosophy, is most often used as a straw man against which some other viewpoint is contrasted. But Rand is one of a very short list that's seriously considered it as an ethical foundation. Often terming this approach "rational self-interest", she deviated from habit and used the term "selfishness" in the book title in an admittedly deliberate effort to be provocative. One reason for this is that, since she thought 20th century US conservatives (among others) had damaged rights of property and free thought by being apologetic where self-benefit was concerned, she should trounce any appearance of humility on the matter. She often said that the "devastation of our age" was a function of instances of pity where self interest properly should have been. The justification of this viewpoint proceeds from an individualistic metaphysical conclusion that life is an individual (and not a collective) matter, leading to the point that a human requires individual benefit (such as freedom or property) to effect survival. This gives rise to her comparative term "anti-life", used to describe social systems that seek to separate people from the benefits of their own actions.