While I would not describe myself as a true Trekkie, I have followed the Star Trek saga for several decades. I did not believe that there was anything else to squeeze out of the franchise, so I was surprised to learn that a prequel was in the works. This week I went to see the new movie – and I loved it. I was impressed with the story line that gradually introduces to the main characters of the original series, including Captain Kirk, Mr Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura.

There is no shortage of books about Google (the company, not the search engine.) The Google story by David A Vise; Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know by Randall Stross; The Google Way: How One Company is Revolutionizing Management As We Know It by Bernard Girard; and What would Google do? by Jeff Jarvis, to name but a few. Most of these books are full of praise for the company, its methods, its ethos, its success.

Everyone is wailing about the greedy bankers. But have we ever stopped to ask where they learned to be so greedy? Who taught them? Was the message of greed that they absorbed implicit or explicit? I found some startling answers to these questions in Philip Delves Broughton’s What they teach you at Harvard Business School – my two years inside the cauldron of capitalism. In 2004, after realizing that the School’s alumni seemed to run the world, the author abandoned his job as Paris bureau chief of London's Daily Telegraph newspaper, and joined 900 other would-be tycoons. Within the pages of this witty account of his time at the School, Broughton reveals some real insights into what the financial elite learn at HBS.

Sometimes you can get caught out with a real bummer of a book. I was leafing through Life Support: A survival guide for the modern soul by Derek Draper in a bookshop, and although I had never heard of this “award-winning psychotherapist” and “MIND Journalist of the Year” before, a chapter entitled Coping with Recession caught my eye. I have been reading copiously what business people have been saying about the recession, so why not look at a psychotherapist’s angle?

Several books on the shelves are attempting to answer the big question: who caused the credit crunch? Now along comes Tetsuya Ishikawa, a former investment banker who held positions at Goldman Sachs, ANB AMRO and Morgan Stanley (which made him redundant in October last year), and says: “I did!” When he first decided to write a whistle-blower’s account of his encounters with financial weapons of mass destruction, aka credit derivatives, he came up with a highly technical manuscript that would be meaningless to the general public. So he decided to write a fictional portrayal of global credit markets over the last seven years. How I Caused the Credit Crunch is guaranteed to make you sick to your stomach.