The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, by Francis Fukuyama.

The project is like "Guns, Germs, and Steel", but with a focus on institutions. Basically, it's an overview of all the different routes political development has taken. It mostly presents historical examples. This overview of the first book is decent, which covers autonomous states in China, India, the Middle East (so early Islam, Mamluk slave-military-rulers (!), and Europe (he focuses on the balance of powers between Church/aristocracy/monarchy in France, Spain+Early Spanish Colonies, Denmark, UK, Hungary and Russia) up to the French Revolution. The second volume covers modern democracy (contrasting early American and European democracy, and contemporary Italy/Greece v Northern Europe), colonial and post-colonial states (contrasting Latin America and African, and then the different paths within each area), and bureaucracies (a lot of German stuff; a surprisingly interesting discussion of the US Forest Service). He makes some nods to contemporary issues at the end of the last book, but probably not in a way that will trigger any particular tribal reflexes; he talks about why he thinks contemporary American bureaucracy has degraded in quality over time, about political gridlock, and about lobbying and corruption.

I highly recommend the project as a cure for a sort of myopia where we take our contemporary political concerns as the starting ground for our general model of how societies vary. He's admirable in not trying to force-fit everything to a particular pattern: He explicitly highlights Costa Rica and Botswana as more successful than his general theories would predict, and Argentina as less successful. Unlike other grand-sweeping-overview books, his history comes across as neither reactionary nor reformist.

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Superman by Habit

One might be interested in Lyons' Probability on Trees and Networks. For a non-expert some cognitive-kilometers away from probability theory, the text is surprisingly readable.

Generation Kill. While I can't know how accurate or biased it ultimately is, it gave me a much more visceral appreciation for the kind of decisions a combatant has to make, and how many of the seeming stupidities of war arise as a result of perfectly rational decisions from the various actors based on the information they have available. While I've long had an anti-war tilt, this gave me a new appreciation for how hard some goals (e.g. low civilian casualties) might be to achieve, and what some of the tradeoffs are. The psychology of the often strikingly young Marines - insightful on some subjects, simplistic on others - was also fascinating.