Another good option is Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani. A draft is available at http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html.

I find this book readable and interesting; it does tie the algorithms to practical applications at a high level. It is language-agnostic, so it should be a good fit for almost anybody.