Also of interest...in crises just around the bend

What to Expect When No One’s Expecting

by Jonathan Last (Encounter, $24)

Any worries you have about overpopulation should be put to rest by Jonathan Last’s “rich and detailed” new book, said Nick Gillespie in Bookforum. Fertility rates are declining around the world, and even in the U.S., births have fallen below the pace needed to replace the current population. Last, “an extremely sharp” Weekly Standard writer, tells us why that trend could lead to disaster, but the consequences he describes seem less like “clear-cut emergencies” than challenges we’ll adapt to.

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The Bankers’ New Clothes

by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig (Princeton, $30)

This dissection of the banking industry could be the most important book to emerge since 2008’s financial crisis, said Martin Wolf in the Financial Times. “It makes no sense to build banks sure to collapse in the first big storm,” but that’s what we’ve done by allowing banks to remain dangerously undercapitalized. The Bankers’ New Clothes shows why the rationalizations of the banks are wrong, and “the case is grounded in the financial theory bankers apply to everything—except themselves.”

Present Shock

by Douglas Rushkoff (Current, $27)

Buyers of this “must-read” book are sure to lose a bit of faith in the now, said Don Tapscott in the Toronto Globe and Mail. Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that our growing devotion to information flowing in real time is interfering with our ability to think clearly, and the pleasure of Present Shock is that “so many of Rushkoff’s examples ring true”—from the fact-challenged landscape of 24-hour news to the buy-now frenzy of Black Friday. “Fortunately,” he accompanies his observations with tips that might help us all cope.

Going to Tehran

by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett (Metropolitan, $32)

Flynt and Hillary Leverett’s book is, if nothing else, “a potent reminder” of how political agendas distort policy discussions, said Laura Secor in The New York Times. The authors, veterans of the State Department and the National Security Council, make the bold argument that to avert war with Iran, we need a new Nixon-to-China moment. Alas, “rather than delivering a corrective” to Washington’s belligerent perspective, this blind defense of the Islamic Republic instead seems “its mirror image.”