The Looming Tower is a very well-written history of the people and background of the 9/11 attacks.

I thought this anecdote, that happened at the Kabul zoo in the aftermath of the Taliban's takeover of the city, was poignant:

One zealous, perhaps mad, Taliban jumped into a bear's cage and cut off his nose, reportedly because the animal's "beard" was not long enough. Another fighter, intoxicated by events and his own power, leaped into the lion’s den and cried out, “I am the lion now!” The lion killed him. Another Taliban soldier threw a grenade into the den, blinding the animal. These two, the noseless bear and the blind lion, together with two wolves, were the only animals that survived the Taliban rule.

• Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, Everett 2009 (on the Pirahã people; review)
• Drugs 2.0, Powers (review)
• The Recollections Of Eugene P. Wigner: As Told To Andrew Szanton (review)
• Handbook of Intelligence: Evolutionary Theory, Historical Perspective, and Current Concepts (review)

(Links are to my GoodReads notes about them)

The related books Superforecasting and Future Babble are about predicting the socio-econo-political future - how people usually fail at it, esp. overconfident pundits - and how it doesn't matter because people forget and they get invited again. The contents align nicely with LW-themes (in terms of instrumental rationality, probabilistic reasoning and recognizing biases etc.), and apply them to read-world prediction making. Some people get quite good at foreseeing events.