Students sometimes ask me for book recommendations. Here are a few books that I can highly recommend.

Urban and Regional Economics

• Myrdal, Gunnar. 1957. Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions. New York: Harper & Row. This short book by Myrdal provides one of the best perspectives on how local economies grow and decline. The book is also known as Rich Lands and Poor .
• Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. The great Jane Jacobs' best book. Not a work of scholarship, but the product of a very observant eye: Jacobs tells us how something as small as the width of a sidewalk can make or break a neighborhood.

Culture

• Fischer, David Hackett. 1991. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer maintains that the regional cultures in the United States stem from the cultures brought by four different streams of British immigrants during colonial times.
• Scott, James C. 1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press. James C. Scott shows how oppression creates a distinctive cultural reaction among the oppressed. The book provides the best description I've seen of the cultural effects of slavery.

The Evolution of Political Organization

• Kelly, Robert L. 1995. The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter-Gatherer Lifeways. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. If you were to read a single book on the way that foragers live and have lived, this synthesis of the vast ethnographic literature would be an excellent choice.
• Bellwood, Peter. 2004. First Farmers: The Origins of Agricultural Societies. Blackwell Publishers. Bringing together evidence from genetics, comparative linguistics, and archeology, Bellwood describes and explains the Neolithic transition.
• Earle, Timothy. 2002. Bronze Age Economics: The Beginnings of Political Economies. Boulder: Westview Press. Earle is an archaeologist, an authority on chiefdoms and early states; this book looks at Bronze Age Denmark, the pre-Columbian Andes, and Hawaii.
• Finer, Samuel E. 1999. History of Government (Three Volumes). Oxford: Oxford University Press. A wonderfully detailed survey of the ways in which states have been organized, from the time of Sumer to the present.

The Evolutionary Basis of Human Behavior

• Dunbar, Robin; Louise Barrett; and John Lycett. 2001. Human Evolutionary Psychology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Perhaps the best introduction to the quickly developing sciences of human evolutionary psychology and human ecology.
• Ridley, Matt. 2000. Genome . New York: HarperCollins. Ridley is one of the world's best science writers, and was once the science editor for The Economist. Here he reviews what is known about the human genome.

History of Economic Thought

• Muller, Jerry Z. 2002. The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Muller is a gifted writer, with a vast knowledge of European political thought. More people should read this book.

The War in Iraq and the War against Islamist Terror

• Anonymous. 2004. Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror. Washington, D.C.: Brassey's Inc. Perhaps the best book to date about the war against America-hating Islamists. The author is 'anonymous' because he is still employed at the CIA.
• McCarthy, Justin. 2001. The Ottoman Peoples and the End of Empire. London: Arnold Press. What do Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Palestine, Israel, Kuwait, and Iraq have in common? Justin McCarthy provides the historical background for some of today's most persistent conflicts, explaining how they emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.

Social Network Analysis

• Scott, John. 2000. Social Network Analysis: A Handbook (second edition). London: Sage Publications, Ltd. Scott has written the most accessible introduction to Social Network Analysis.
• Wasserman, Stanley and Katherine Faust. 1994. Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wasserman and Faust provide an encyclopedic survey of the mathematical methods used in Social Network Analysis.

General Economics

• Olson, Mancur. 1982. The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities . New Haven: Yale University Press. Over twenty years old, but still one of the best books ever written about the economic problems of representative democracies.
• Thaler, Richard H. 1992. The Winner's Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thaler's very readable book catalogs anomalies--the instances where empirical evidence shows that widely accepted economic theory doesn't work. In economics, as in other sciences, theory evolves to explain anomalous facts, so the book is valuable in helping economists understand why theory is developing as it is.