A true communist future requires a break with billionaire futurism, and that means not being blinded by the sleek visions of Silicon Valley that present technology as the solution to all our problems. Bastani should have left ‘fully automated luxury communism’ to massively online meme lords, but instead he has tainted any real left vision of the future by falling prey to the billionaire futurist version.

Slick, brand-driven star power legitimizes the neoliberal status quo, obscuring growing inequalities as the alt-right and climate crisis loom on the horizon. This is the backdrop for Martin Lukacs’ first book, The Trudeau Formula, a comprehensive and devastating analysis of Justin Trudeau’s dazzling rise to power and the bleak realities of his government.

At the start of the 2017 leadership campaign, many thought of the slogan “love and courage” as vapid and clichéd. Many forgot that this slogan and Singh’s chardi kala spirit echo Jack Layton’s parting words to Canadians back in 2011: “Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear”. Layton’s underdog Orange Wave continues to be the high water mark for where Singh ought to take the NDP.

Finkel’s study makes a significant contribution to the literature on social history and policy. For researchers interested in comparative or cross-national comparative social policy studies, this book is foundational. Compassion is also an essential resource for those who study history, sociology, political science, social administration, social policy and social work.

This masterful exegesis tells of a group of thinkers who formulated the assumptions and prescriptions of global neoliberalism. This intellectual history tells of their underlying nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War when beliefs about the smooth functioning of the old order ignored its exploitation of the majority of the people and of the resources in the world.

No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous is an important work on Canadian colonialism from the perspective of colonized people, although the author himself is Euro-Canadian. Krasowski emphasizes that treaties involved both Indigenous and new Canadians and both sides have rights and responsibilities as a result of the “Treaty Bundle.”

Talaga, in her book Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City, and Anishnaabe comedian Ryan McMahon, in a five-part podcast series, Thunder Bay, aim to reveal the scandalous and shameful nature of the city and to expose the consequences of that nature, primarily through a study of the auspicious deaths of several Indigenous teenagers.

Writers need to develop characters without taking the easy way out. Using bipolar disorder or any other mental illness as a shortcut to explaining character’s murderous motivation is too easy and too wrong. Your neighbor, friend, or coworker with bipolar disorder is not some blood thirsty killer just waiting to emerge when the meds wear off. They are people just like the rest of us, with unique personality traits that probably don’t include the insatiable desire to kill, kill, kill.

Unpredictability, economic unpredictability in particular, means that it’s never a good idea to leave things without a good plan. A truly free market is chaotic and leaves too much room for the possibility of failure, especially for the wealthy and well-endowed. A good plan, however, limits the possibility of failure and tries to make things work for the best possible outcomes. But in the absence of democratic control over planning, who sees the rewards of those best possible outcomes?

Direct Action Gets the Goods is the latest graphic novel from the Graphic History Collective along with artists Althea Balmes, Gord Hill, Orion Keresztesi, and David Lester. It is slim volume but it packs a punch. Subtitled A Graphic History of The Strike in Canada, it does not purport to be a comprehensive history of every strike throughout Canadian history.