'It was a language of masonry, redolent with ornament and detail, emerging from the belief that every building, no matter how private, showed a public presence - that it had an obligation to the street and to anyone who paused before it, whether or not they had reason to walk through its doors.'
The passion in Goldberger's sweeping, vivid descriptions gave me goosebumps. Read it. Read it especially if you have never read about architecture before. It inspires the desire to set out on an architectural tour of the world, but like me, you may have to settle with an extensive Google image search.
Required reading for my favorite ECON course, this book serves as an enlightening overview of development theory so far. Easterly offers an honest critique of recent financial aid mechanisms and employs economics to explain why these attempts have failed; it is the theory itself and the lending institutions he finds problematic, not simply corruptable third world leaders (not to say that this does not occur). I think this book is phenomenal and consider it a fieldguide to development economics. This book is also a great place to start if you are newly interested in such things.