Don't Pee on My Leg and Tell Me It's Raining: America's Toughest Family Court Judge Speaks Out by Judy Sheindlin (1997)

The author of the book (who around the time of the publication became Judge Judy on TV as these views didn't seem to fly well politically) describes the warped world of the Family Court, encouraging total irresponsibility to child bearing and rearing (this includes both mother and many cases "unknown" father sides), and family relations. She is really making a strong case for abolishing the welfare system as implemented (and this was written after seeing the results of the Welfare Reform of 1996) and reforming family laws (and court attitude as be). The sad thing is, that it seems that nothing much changed around these topics for the last 10 years either ...

Uncommon Carriers by John McPhee (2006)

The author travels on many things moving, including 18 wheelers, a barge, small size replicas of tankers and ocean liners in the French Alps, on more. Some of these collected stories are a good read, including the story of independent truck owner hauling various hazmat chemicals across the US (and the ecosystem grown around him), and the story of the Nova Scotia lobster "apartments" and the enormous sized UPS package sorting facility in Louisville, KY, some others just seem drawn out.

100 Bullshit Jobs...And How to Get Them by Stanley Bing (2006)

The author offers an inspiring list of various bullshit jobs available with or without significant educational requirements (and also recognizes his own job of being of BS kind). This includes aromatherapist, road-kill collector, Feng-Shui consultant, life style coach, and up to the Chairman and the Vice President. While getting some of these jobs would require long climbing up the ladder, offer only minimal wage or unpleasant working conditions, there is a silver lining shining through, one might be able to discover some bullshit aspects in one's own job ... A good listening.

The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny by Robin Sharma (1994)

It is fascinating to see how much psycho babble is out there. Lets take a quick look first at the author of this book. Mr. Sharma, based on his own admission, is travelling (and very likely not walking) more than 100000 miles a year, no wonder he sold that Ferrari, and likely bought a personal jet instead. If you can make a living giving lectures at several thousands (or maybe several ten thousands) dollars a pop, why exactly would you keep a 9 to 5 (or 6 to 9 in many of the worst cases) job working for somebody? The fable itself also raises some interesting questions. So what exactly happened to the money received when the very wealthy lawyer sold all his belongings? Was he able to place all those monies into some deferred taxation retirement accounts? There was certainly no mention of giving it all away ... And indeed how does this person afford and desire to fly between continents if he has nothing to his name and wanting to have a simple life? This seems to be exactly the lifestyle the author created for himself, which is good for him, but very likely not many of the readers would be able to copy his success. Strangely the yogi teachers referenced in the book have no desire to travel anywhere from their hidden village and even less desire to sell themselves on seminars (reminding us all those other billions of persons on our planet, who simply do not have the means to do these things regardless of any amount of daily psychobabble they would be engaging in).

Prisoner's Dilemma by William Poundstone (1992)

This is a story of game theory/minimax theory (which in one of its earliest form was used to identify bombing targets), with a biography of John von Neumann as related, the research and creation of first atomic bombs and the hydrogen bomb, the preventative war theory as subscribed to many in the US armed forces and government and the first think tank, the RAND.
A two person interaction can be categorized as Prisoner's Dilemma (gain by testifying against your conspirator), Chicken (think "game of chicken"), Deadlock (encourages defection) and Stag Hunt (encourages cooperation). Discussions and experiments suggest, that defection (non-cooperation, "selfish gene"?) could be a good strategy for many of single interactions, while cooperation works well for repeated interactions, where players use various strategies. Interestingly the best strategy for simulations of Prisoner's Dilemma is TIT-FOR-TAT (or "almost" TIT-FOR-TAT), where the player cooperates until the other party starts defecting, than it defects until the other party starts cooperating. While these theories do somewhat match the realities of two player games, they are much less applicable to multi party games, especially where players are allowed/encouraged to form alliances (as it happens in real life situations).