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Absolutely the most informative, moving, horrifying book I've read in ages is Jared Diamond's "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." If you have any doubts that we're on an ecological Titanic headed for our date with the iceberg, this book will cure you. One scary example: If the people of China, and China alone among emerging industrial powerhouses, manage to achieve first world status, their impact on the planet will be the same as if the population had doubled from 6.5 billion to 13 billion in just a couple of years. Imagine: 13 billion people -- eating, drinking, excreting, driving, generating waste, cutting down forests to build houses, using GE crops to increase yields, food getting scarcer, new and more resistent germs, drinking water getting more toxic, "crowd" diseases running unchecked through dense populations, double the carbon pumped into the atmosphere, rising sea levels shrinking habitable land, oil running out with nothing to replace it, and no way out of the downward spiral except a massive die-off of the human species, drastically reducing the global human impact, at least temporarily. Unfortunately, we'll take the innocents down with us as most of the large mammals go extinct, sensitive ecosystems, such as coral reefs and rain forests, will collapse, along with the rare species they provide habitat for.
However, in an absolutely unprecedented turn of events never before seen in human history, even the rich will get screwed. All the numbered accounts in the world won't help them build their own "gated" planet. So at least there's that small consolation.
I'd also recommend Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." It's been around a while, but I finally got around to reading it, rather than just using it for reference. It's American history told from the viewpoint of the losers, rather than the rich white guys who have been winning the class war for hundreds of years and whose stories we all learned in school -- except for the parts about genocide; the class, race and gender biases of the "founding fathers;" numerous attempts by workers to organize and redistribute the wealth; the steady rise of the top 2 percent, who even two hundred years ago had combined income greater than the bottom 60 percent and owned more than half the country's land and resources; the utter subjugation of women, the real reasons behind the Civil War, and so on. It's amazing to read your own history, undistorted by the usual bias favoring rich white elites.
And that's it for light reading. ;-)
wp
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