damerell

It's certainly a good read.

The book I wouldn't recommend as such, but found memorable, is Murray Rothbard's The Mystery of Banking, you can find it one the internet, at least you could a few years back. My experience of reading it can be summed up by this condensed inner monologue:

"Hmmm, this is quite interesting, and very readable... he's putting that point a bit strongly... oh, come on, try to be fair here... Hmmm, could this guy be one of those libertarians I keep hearing about? [checks wikipedia] Big famous libertarian academic, libertarian as *&@!"

The particular thing that stuck in my mind was how much in favour of bank runs he was. Much better written and more scholarly than the ravings of the average internet libertarian, but at the end of the day fundamentally the same thing. So not really recommended, and seeing as it was written in 1983 and takes a broad sweep of history, not really an answer to the question either...

You should probably take it with a pinch of salt: the author had a few howlers about Silicon Valley's political history, which damned it in the eyes of not a few.

A friend who's in more of a position to know has not actually been good enough to read the thing before me and vouch for the anthropology.

(I've still not read it, but it might be getting nearer.)