Scott Page is a professor of political science and economics at the University of Michigan, where he's also the associate director of the Center for the Study of Complex Systems, and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. (Disclosure: I worked for Scott when I was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center, and I'm also external faculty at SFI, so take my enthusiasm with salt to taste.) Scott's written lots of academic papers, and co-written a textbook, but The Difference is, well, different. It's a serious, but also playful, look at the power and virtues of diversity when it comes to solving difficult problems. It draws together many insights from many different academic disciplines, without requiring any special knowledge of its readers, just willingness to stretch their minds a little.