Books I'd Recommend

Cognitive Science

• Calculated Risks - Gerd Gigerenzer
  How the representation of statistics affects how we think about them.

• Being There - Andy Clark
  The importance of considering mind in conjunction with body and environment, in considering human cognition.

• Godel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
  Pulitzer Prize winning book about... the subtitle is the best summary: "A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll" -- Absolutely brilliant.

• Le Ton Beau de Marot - Douglas Hofstadter
  Cognitive considerations in translation--amazing book--the reason I went to grad school.

Complexity Science

• Emergence - John Holland
  A great easy introduction to the concept of emergence.

• Introduction to Genetic Algorithms - Melanie Mitchell
  Excellent introduction to evolutionary computation.

• A New Kind of Science - Stephen Wolfram
  A badly written book with phenomenal pictures and some important ideas about patterns in the universe--focused on cellular automata.

• Linked - Albert-László Barabási
  Great easy read about really important recent ideas in network theory.

Fiction

• Dune - Frank Herbert
  

  `There should be a science of discontent.'

  Politics, leadership, and ecology

• Earth - David Brin
  

  Microsingularity eating the Earth's core.

  Environment, ecology, emergent intelligence

Global Justice

• Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered - E.F. Schumacher
  Influential book about ethics in economics.

• Natural Capitalism - Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins
  Life altering.

• Good News for a Change - David Suzuki, Holly Dressel
  What people are doing right in the world to battle the serious problems that we face. Very hope-inspiring.

• Nickel and Dimed - Barbara Ehrenreich
  Account of a journalist who attempted to make it in the US on a minimum wage income.

• Culture Jam - Kalle Lasn
  from the founder of AdBusters

• Webs of Power - Starhawk
  "Notes from the Global Uprising" -- first hand accounts of the WTO / G8 protests around the world plus in depth discussion of how to organize actions in a complex - diverse system.

• Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser
  Excellent expose on the fast food and meat packing industry -- and the arguments against them are perhaps not what you'd expect.

History

• Intimate History of Humanity - Theodore Zeldin
  A unique and perspective-altering way of presenting history.

Self Development

• Transforming Your Dragons - Jose Stevens
  Great metaphorical analysis of personality characteristics.