Sorry I dropped the ball on this for the past month and a half. We went to Australia for a month, and I checked only email the system described as "urgent."(posted 8627 days ago)As to what you should read, I have always thought that Robert Reich's _The Work of Nations_ is quite good, although not as a description of the present: it is a forecast of what the future might bring.
Books I think are good include:
Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System, by Barry J. Eichengreen (Princeton University Press, 1996).
Globaphobia: Confronting Fears About Open Trade, by Gary Burtless, et al. (Brookings Institution: 1998).
The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi (Beacon Press, 1944).
Has Globalization Gone too Far? by Dani Rodrik (Institute for International Economics, 1997).
How Much Do National Borders Matter? by John Helliwell, (Brookings Institution, 1998).
The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for Twenty-First Century Capitalism, by Robert B. Reich (A.A. Knopf, 1991).
Books that I think are interesting as expressions of currents of thought (but which I would not trust) include:
The Case Against Free Trade: GATT, NAFTA, and the Globalization of Corporate Power, by Ralph Nader et al. (Earth Island Press and North Atlantic Books, 1998). Globalization and Its Discontents, by Saskia Sassen (New York: New Press, 1998).
One World, Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism, by Wiliam Greider (Simon and Schuster, 1997).
Sincerely yours,