One was "Cubed" by Nikil Saval, which was a fairly entertaining history of the office. The second half went by quickly without a lot of real excitement because, like... that's my life, man, open-plan and ping-pong tables and what-not. Hearing about olde-tymey counting-houses was interesting though. I liked the bit where Alan Harrington was quoted as saying: "Every so often I hear my seniors at the corporation inveigh against socialism, and it seems strange. I think that our company resembles nothing as much as a private socialist system".
Also read Michael Lewis's "Boomerang". He's still good at writing nonficition page-turners, but there's something that really itches at me about his analysis of the (Irish, Icelandic, Greek, American) situations; it's that too much of the analysis seems to rest on It's Just The Way Those People Are, You Know? I'm not saying that national cultures don't exist, or don't have consequences, to be sure. Yet I think they're much more heterogeneous/permeable/ephemeral than he thinks they are. Or at least making the inferences he does smells of stereotype-confirmation-bias.
