I highly recomend listening to the following lecture from Jeffery Sachs.
An intelligent, well argued and fascinating interpretation of the state of the US economy. Also provides a very good overview of US Economic policy over the last 30 years.
Lecture, slides and so forth can be found here:
http://www2.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/events/2011/20111205t1830vOT.aspx
I am looking forward to reading the book.
AlphaEconomics 