The story of the founding of the Santa Fe institute, and interviews with the various very smart people that founded it, their ideas about systems and complexity and how they're not like the other economists, no no, they understand humans are complicated and that's why you need lots of numbers instead of few numbers.

The book has some technical detail but not much; it's very much a layman's book, and it's very good in that regard. It gives a good primer on the various root ideas in complexity theory and emergence. What may be useful to an academic are the interviews; this is as close as you get, in regards to understanding the reasoning behind the research of these professors, without actually attending a lecture.