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Fiction and Non-fiction at the moment.
The non-fiction book just about finished is Peter F. Drucker's "Managing in a Time of Great Change." It's a collection of articles Drucker wrote that appeared in the Harvard Business Review between 1992 and 1995. They are all on the general theme of managing in a post-capitalist society. Despite being written over 20 years ago, they are still highly pertinent, and illustrate the fact that businesses and governments tend not to learn from errors, as actions that have been proven wrong are still repeated. I consider Drucker's "Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices" to be the single best book on the subject I've read, and recommend anything Drucker wrote. This is simply another good work from a management theorist I've never seen do a bad book.
The fiction just completed is Ian Douglas's Star Carrier: Deep Time, the sixth book in a series centered on the Star Carrier America, a space going fighter carrier and her battlegroup. Earth is united under a Confederation of which the United States of North America is an uneasy part. We've expanded out into the galaxy, and met a race called the Aglestch, who are vaguely arachnid, and galactic traders. The are also members of something called the Sh'Daar collective, a group of races under the command of something called the Sh'Daar. The Sh'Daar become aware of humanity through the Aglestch, and pass word to Earth that we will become part of their polity, and that we will abandon certain technologies The technologies involved are things seen as critical to human development, and the Sh'Daar ultimatum is not well received. The events will lead to a civil war on Earth between the USNA and the Confederation, at the same time fighting erupts between humanity and various Sh'Daar client species.
Douglas is a pseudonym of William R. Keith, whose Warstrider series under his own name I previously read. Warstriders is set in a universe where Imperial Japan rules Earth, and a colony settled from North America is in rebellion against them. I got a laugh from Keith at a convention when I told him he almost made the giant fighting suits of Japanese Anime believable. (I normally see such things as big targets for current weaponry.) Keith has a knack for creating truly strange alien species, like the Xenos from Warstriders, who live in planetary mantles, one per planet, and divide the world into rock and not-rock. They are sentient, but have no concept of anything beyond the world they inhabit, or that there might be any other sentients in existence. The Star Carrier books are full of even weirder aliens.
Lots of fun, and recommended if you like military SF and odd alien species.
Also up in non-fiction is Joseph Schumpter's "Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy". Schumpeter was an Austrian economist (and briefly Austria's Finance Minister) and a contemporary of John Maynard Keynes. Like Keynes, he considered himself inspired by Marx. But he felt Marx "asked all the right questions, and got all the wrong answers". The book is a lengthy analysis of what Marx got wrong and why.
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Dennis
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