Triple Crown: Winning Canada’s Energy Future
Jim Prentice and Jean-Sebastien Rioux
HarperCollins, Feb. 21, 2017, $32.99

Canada has a world-class resource base and the capacity to become a world leader in the petroleum and other resource-based industries. But as former federal cabinet minister and Alberta premier Jim Prentice argues in this provocative and timely new book, we’ve lost our way. He outlines how our nation has repeatedly stumbled in its attempts to become a global player in the field, and how our policies and practices have failed to advance Canada’s international interests as an energy producer and exporter with a record of sound environmental achievement. Ultimately, one of Canada’s greatest strengths has become a liability—economically, socially, and environmentally.

From Wall Street to Bay Street: The Origins and Evolution of American and Canadian Finance
Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin
Rotman-UTP Publishing, July 16, 2017, $60.00

From Wall Street to Bay Street is the first book for a lay audience to tackle the similarities and differences between the financial systems of Canada and the U.S. Christopher Kobrak and Joe Martin reveal the different paths each system has taken since the early nineteenth century, despite the fact they both originate from the British system. The authors trace the roots of each country’s financial systems back to Alexander Hamilton and insightfully argue that while Canada has preserved a Hamiltonian financial tradition, the U.S. has favoured the populist Jacksonian tradition since the 1830s.

From Wall Street to Bay Street offers a timely and accessible comparison of financial systems that reflects the political and cultural milieus of two of the world’s top 10 economies.

Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests
Peter H. Russell
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, May 2017, $39.95

One hundred fifty years after Confederation, Canada is known around the world for its social diversity and its commitment to principles of multiculturalism. But the road to contemporary Canada is a winding one, a story of division and conflict as well as union and accommodation.

In Canada’s Odyssey, renowned scholar Peter H. Russell provides an expansive, accessible account of Canadian history from pre-Confederation to present day. By focusing on what he calls the “three pillars” of English Canada, French Canada, and Aboriginal Canada, Russell advances an important view of our country as one founded on and informed by “incomplete conquests.” It’s the very incompleteness of these conquests that have made Canada what it is today: not just a multicultural society but a multinational one.

Environmental Economics and Sustainability
Brian Chi-ang Lin and Siqi Zheng
Wiley-Blackwell, April 2017, $41.95

Environmental Economics and Sustainability presents a collection of peer-reviewed research articles contributed by international experts that reveal the current state of our knowledge in the field of environmental economics.

It presents the latest research results on a plethora of issues relating to environmental economics and sustainability, and addresses several of the contemporary challenges of sustainability while infusing new energy into the field of environmental economics.

Faster, Higher, Farther: The Volkswagen Scandal
Jack Ewing
W. W. Norton & Co., May 2017, $36.95

In mid-2015, Volkswagen (VW) surpassed Toyota as the world’s largest automaker. A few months later, the EPA disclosed that Volkswagen had installed software in 11 million cars that deceived emissions-testing mechanisms. By early 2017, VW had settled with American regulators and car owners for $20 billion, with additional lawsuits still looming. In Faster, Higher, Farther, Jack Ewing rips the lid off the conspiracy. He describes VW’s rise from “the people’s car” during the Nazi era to one of Germany’s most prestigious and important global brands, touted for being “green.” He paints vivid portraits of VW chair Ferdinand Piëch and CEO Martin Winterkorn, arguing that the corporate culture they fostered drove employees to illegal methods. Unable to build cars that could meet emissions standards in the U.S. honestly, engineers were left with no choice but to cheat. VW then compounded the fraud by spending millions marketing “clean diesel,” only to have the lie exposed by a handful of researchers on a shoestring budget, resulting in a guilty plea to criminal charges in a landmark Department of Justice case.

The Selected Letters of John Kenneth Galbraith
Richard P. F. Holt (ed.)
Cambridge University Press, April 30, 2017, $39.95

The Selected Letters of John Kenneth Galbraith invites readers to join in conversations with presidents and first ladies and a host of other correspondents.

Galbraith wrote thousands of letters, and editor Richard P. F. Holt has selected the most important of these from his archival research, now available in print for the first time. The letters provide an intimate account of the three main political goals to which Galbraith devoted his professional life: ending war, fighting poverty, and improving quality of life by achieving a balance between private and public goods in an affluent capitalist society.

The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics and the Sweep of Human Interaction
Richard Bookstaber
Princeton University Press, May 1, 2017, $37.95

In The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber, one of the world’s leading risk managers, discusses why the human condition and the radical uncertainty of our world renders the standard economic model—and the theory behind it—useless for dealing with financial crises. What model should replace it? None. At least, not any version we’ve been using for the past 200 years.

Instead, Bookstaber argues for a new approach called agent-based economics, one that takes as a starting point the fact that we are humans, not the optimizing automatons that standard economics assumes we are.

The Devil’s Financial Dictionary
Jason Zweig
Public Affairs, April 11, 2017, $20.99

The Devil’s Financial Dictionary skewers the plutocrats and bureaucrats who gave us exploding mortgages, freakish risks, and banks too big to fail. And it distils the complexities, absurdities, and pomposities of Wall Street into plain truths and aphorisms.

An indispensable survival guide to the hostile wilderness of today’s financial markets, The Devil’s Financial Dictionary delivers practical insights with a scorpion’s sting.

Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business
Aswath Damodaran
Columbia University Press, January 2017, $39.95

Aswath Damodaran, finance professor and experienced investor, argues that the power of story drives corporate value, adding substance to numbers and persuading even cautious investors to take risks. In business, there are the storytellers who spin compelling narratives and the number crunchers who construct meaningful models and accounts. Both are essential to success, but only by combining the two, Damodaran argues, can a business deliver and sustain value.

Through a range of case studies, Narrative and Numbers describes how storytellers can better incorporate and narrate numbers and how number crunchers can calculate more imaginative models that withstand scrutiny.

Naked Money: A Revealing Look at What It Is and Why It Matters
Charles Wheelan
W. W. Norton & Co., April 11, 2017, $23.95 (now in paperback)

What makes a $20 bill actually worth $20? In the third volume of his bestselling Naked series, Charles Wheelan uses this seemingly simple question to open the door to the surprisingly colourful world of money and banking.

The search for an answer triggers countless other questions along the way: Why does paper money (“fiat currency”) even exist? Why do some nations, like Zimbabwe in the 1990s, print so much of it that it becomes more valuable as toilet paper than as currency? And why does most of Europe share a common currency?

With illuminating stories from around the globe, Wheelan demystifies the curious world behind the paper in our wallets and the digits in our bank accounts.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy
Mervyn King
W. W. Norton & Co., March 2017, $24.95

Something is wrong with our banking system. We all sense that, but Mervyn King knows it firsthand; his 10 years at the helm of the Bank of England, including at the height of the financial crisis, revealed profound truths about the mechanisms of our capitalist society. In The End of Alchemy, he offers us an essential work about the history and future of money and banking—the keys to modern finance.

Shark Drunk: The Art of Catching a Large Shark from a Tiny Rubber Dinghy in a Big Ocean
Morten Strøksnes, Alfred A. Knopf
June 27, 2017, $35.95

In the great depths surrounding the Lofoten Islands in Norway lives the infamous Greenland shark. At 26 feet in length and weighing more than a ton, it’s truly a beast to behold. But the shark is not just known for its size alone: its meat contains a toxin that, when consumed, has been known to make people drunk and hallucinatory.

Shark Drunk is the true story of two friends, the author and the eccentric artist Hugo Aasjord, as they embark on a wild pursuit of the famed creature— from a tiny rubber boat. Together, the two men tackle existential questions, survive the world’s most powerful maelstrom, and, yes, get drunk.