I really enjoyed Guns, Germs and Steel a few years back, so I thought I’d pick up Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. It’ll contain bad news, I’m guessing, I haven't dug into it yet. Jared Diamond's great. I just saw him deliver a lecture on PBS a few months ago.

I just finished Freakonomics by Steven Levitt. It's quite interesting. Quite a few passages in it made me uncomfortable but it certainly shows that cause and effect are not always clear and that the actions we take can have a lot of unintended consequences. It gets a thumbs up, too.