What books should chief executives be reading as they sit by their villa pools this summer?
Holiday reading is, of course, a very personal matter. The prime aim of a break is to refresh body and mind, and some will find that easier staring into the middle distance or sailing a yacht than poring over yet more print.
But holidays can be a useful time for business people to raise their eyes from the day-to-day grind and take stock of the wider social and economic context in which they are operating. For this group, the literary holy grail is that rare book that entertains, stimulates the intellect, and encourages lateral thinking.
Unfortunately, the biggest business issue of the day - the Internet revolution - has produced remarkably few books which come anywhere near this. Not so The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press), which looks at the interaction between information technology and human intelligence and concludes that information is not the same as knowledge; that it takes human flair and enthusiasm to create wisdom.
A strength of the book is that it is written not by luddites but by two men close to the cutting edge: John Seely Brown is chief scientist at Xerox's Palo Alto research centre, home of some of computing's biggest breakthroughs, while Paul Duguid is an academic at the University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Lewis captures some of the flavour of Silicon Valley in The New New Thing (Hodder & Stoughton), an uneven but entertaining portrait of Jim Clark, the larger-than-life serial entrepreneur who created the Internet browser company Netscape.
Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (Fourth Estate) covers that other high-technology revolution - genetics. Science writer Matt Ridley gives a lucid layperson's guide to the nature of human genes, their function and the philosophical implications of applied genetics.
Anyone with severe market withdrawal symptoms should read Irrational Exuberance (Princeton), a critique of the Wall Street bull market by Robert Shiller, Yale economics professor, who examines the psychological factors (herd behaviour, sports-like media coverage and new age thinking) behind the rise of the Dow and reaches some chilling conclusions.
For a historic perspective, The Go-Go Years by John Brooks (Wiley) is a classic account of 1960s exuberance (with some eerie parallels to now) and its spectacular demise. For takeover junkies, Taken for a Ride: How Daimler-Benz Drove Off With Chrysler by Bill Vlasic and Bradley Stertz (Wiley), presents a breathless and US-centric but entertaining account of Daimler's swallowing of Chrysler.
Globalisation is another big business issue, but books on the subject tend to be dull or platitudinous - not great beach reading. Better to delve into two works, published a few years ago, that put in sweeping historical context the factors that have made some countries rich and others poor.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes (Little, Brown) offers the analysis of an erudite historian. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (Vintage) presents an original scientist's-eye perspective - a book to change your world view. With a US presidential election in the offing, you may want to know the candidates better. Shrub: the short but happy political life of George W Bush, by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose (Random House), is an irreverent and critical examination of the Republican nominee's record as governor of Texas. Al Gore gets balanced, insightful treatment in Inventing Al Gore: A Biography by Bill Turque (Houghton Mifflin).
Social decay, a topic in this and every other US election, is the subject of a book that could become a sociological classic. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon and Schuster) by Robert Putman laments the decline of informal social institutions, such as bowling leagues, which were once the glue of many US communities. The result: civic malaise amid economic prosperity.
Civic collapse amid political chaos is the theme of In The Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (Fourth Estate), by the FT correspondent Michela Wrong - a grim comedy of the grotesqueries that accompanied the end of the Congo's Mobutu regime.
For sports fans, Brilliant Orange by David Winner (Bloomsbury) is a highly original search for the origins of Dutch football culture, while King of the World (Picador) is the prize-winning story of Muhammad Ali by David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker.
As for novels, two recent ones from heavyweight authors stand out: The Human Stain (Cape) by Philip Roth, the final part of his American trilogy, and Booker prize-winner Disgrace (Vintage), J.M. Coetzee's spare evocation of post-apartheid South Africa.
Among new writers, White Teeth by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton) is a comic family epic of multi-cultural north London. A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (Picador), an autobiography/novel by Dave Eggers, is a huge hit in the US.
For those who prefer their literature classical rather than post-modern, Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (Oxford) is a tale of a great financier's fraudulent machinations in the 1870s railway business, and a satire of a society in the throes of bull market excess. But on second thoughts, perhaps that is a little close to home.
Sheila O'Flanagan returns on Friday, August 25th