Next time you are browsing in a technical bookstore, I recommend Henry Petroski's tome on engineering w.r.t pencils: "The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance". I couldn't get through the entire book but its exhaustively researched.
Very interesting, but the timing is a little awkward. The current disaster in the banking sector doesn't really speak to the brilliance of an unregulated free market, does it? (Or at least, there wasn't much regulation when the banks took greedy, foolish risks, but now that it's all gone south, guess what? Time for government intervention, by golly!)