I just read some biography of Ghengis Khan. Fascinating, I had no idea as to the secular and multicultural governments he set up nor the innovations born from his reign that are still used today. If anyone is interested I'll actually grab it and list the author.
Before that I read "The Massacre at El Mozote", a non-fiction account of, you guessed it, the 1982 killings in El Salvador. Dirt poor Salvadorans caught on the business-end of the Cold War, and yet another case of American meddling in Latin American affairs.