Notes from Toyota-Land, Darius Mehri.
Darius Mehri provides a book version of his diary from three years spent as an engineer at a company in the Toyota system. His writing is very readable, but a bit shaky in structure: it reads just like a diary expanded to a book. The near-total lack of narrative makes it a bit disjointed but even more credible; nothing seems to have been massaged around to make a better story.

His thesis is that the Japanese factory system does not deserve much of the praise and envy directed towards it: the admirable statistics are built on falsified numbers, such as unpaid overtime and dangerously high line speeds coupled with coverups of injuries and deaths. His Japanese workplace is depicted as racist, hierarchical, utterly sexist, and stubborn-minded. In other words, it's roughly like anywhere else, and substantially behind the times in some areas.

I would recommend the book to anyone remotely interested in the subject, or about to get on a plane; it's short, easy to digest, and a page-turner despite its flaws.

Nekropolis, Maureen McHugh
As is standard for McHugh, this is a stunningly humane story. It's fairly short; it's about people in trying situations; and I was very glad to have read it.