Also of interest ...

The Trillion Dollar Meltdown

by Charles R. Morris (PublicAffairs, $23)

This painfully timely book is “no rush job,” said The Economist. Lawyer and former banker Charles Morris saw a global credit crash coming back in 2005, and the result is this “deftly” assembled argument about a crisis that was 40 years in the making and may well unleash a full decade of pain.

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Here Comes Everybody

by Clay Shirky (Penguin, $26)

Clay Shirky has an “awfully cheery” view of the revolutionary effects of Internet-based communication, said Alissa Quart in The Village Voice. His “intellectually fresh” account of how ad-hoc communities are challenging old institutions relies too much on abstraction instead of anecdote. But his argument itself is hard to resist.

The Making of Second Life

by Wagner James Au (HarperCollins, $26)

Journalist Wagner James Au made good use of his front-row seat on “a remarkable corporate story,” said Dean Takahashi in The Wall Street Journal. Au was hired by Linden Lab as an in-house chronicler when the San Francisco–based game maker launched Second Life, its online simulation of the real world. Au’s “fascinating account” of how users began to make Second Life their own delivers “anecdotes so improbable that you have to remind yourself what’s real and what’s not.”

Biography of the Dollar

by Craig Karmin (Crown, $26)

Craig Karmin’s new book is less a definitive history of the world’s leading currency than a collection of “lively tales” and “fascinating tidbits,” said The Economist. Karmin’s overview of the dollar’s “wild youth” shares space with a profile of a currency trader and a vignette about the federal office that reimburses the holders of torn, burnt, or otherwise mutilated bills. Virtually every stop turns out to be “jolly entertaining.”

Banana

by Dan Koeppel (Hudson Street, $24)

Three hundred pages about the banana is not much when you consider how much story there is to tell, said Ralph Ranalli in The Boston Globe. The banana is the world’s No. 4 food staple, it “has shaped and toppled nations,” and is now threatened by a disease that could cause its extinction. Longtime adventure writer Dan Koeppel weaves the political and the cultural together seamlessly, creating a quick read that’s “both fascinating and disturbing.”