Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point. There's a lot to be said for this book and how it can inform social entrepreneurs. Gladwell offers a collection of stories and studies about social epidemics and their causes. It's a great business book.

Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class. I'd read good and bad things about this book, so I looked forward to sampling it. I'm not sure if the "gay-pride-marches-as-development-strategies" are really reading Florida correctly; one thing that really liked about the book was its comparative-institutional perspective. Given that a local government is going to "do something," what is the best strategy? I especially like Florida's ideas about creating a sense of organic place within a city as opposed to big, splashy, subsidized projects like stadiums and malls.

Donald Norman, The Design of Future Things. I'm pretty sure I mentioned this some time ago, but this was an excellent find at a "Friends of the Library" book sale. I'll mention it again since I'm working on a few things that integrate some of Norman's ideas and address some of the points he makes. As a Hayekian, I take from this the insight that context matters and, while we can train computers to calculate, we cannot train them to think. Computers can process information, but I'm not sure that they can use knowledge (particularly tacit knowledge). For those at the forefront of the interface between man and machine, Norman's book has important implications for how we address the complementarities between computational power and human insight.

Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. This was sent to us by a friend and will likely become a regular part of our reading-to-the-baby rotation. This one actually has a pretty good set of lessons about capital, labor, and entrepreneurship. I won't give it away, though--you'll need to read it yourself.

Gerald Weinberg, Weinberg on Writing: The Fieldstone Method. My review is here.

Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture. My review is here.

*--"Recent" is defined as "sometime in the past academic year and not yet discussed in a 'Recent Reading' post."