My first introduction to economic geography was in a third-year class midway between the dot com bust and the great recession. The class reading was mostly comprised of 60s spatial science and long-dead German location theorists, supplemented with guest lectures by commercial real-estate agents and golf course managers. It felt so irrelevant that I lost interest in economic geography for half a decade. Students assigned Barnes and Christophers’ Economic Geography: A Critical Introduction are unlikely to suffer a similar reaction. It is an engaging paean to a discipline and the authors’ enthusiasm for economic geography as a means of interpreting the world, and perhaps even changing it, is palpable. This holds true even when covering material that students may find nap-inducing, like debates in early 20th century economic geography or the continuities between ‘geographical economics’ (e.g. Krugman’s NEG) and ‘business geographies’ (e.g. GPN). The book is divided into two sections, which roughly correspond to the two senses that the book is a ‘critical’ introduction. First, and most innovatively, the authors cast a critical gaze onto economic geography itself throughout the first section. Roughly 60% of the text, the section includes chapters on the scope and history of the discipline, the use (and abuse) of theory, and methods for doing economic geography. The authors do not shy away from the social and economic worlds in which economic geographic thought was produced, nor from the personalities of those who produced it. Indeed, Chapter 7, ‘Unboxing Economic Geography’, uses science studies to discuss how economic geography (dis)functions as a community of practice, warts and all. The book productively surveys the discipline, though some aspects of economic geography are subject to more trenchant critique than others. For example, key thinkers in the business geography camp are held up as exemplars of ‘uncritical’ economic geography, while others who have demonstrably contributed to poor social, cultural and economic outcomes, like Richard Florida, receive light treatment. These criticisms flow from the second sense in which the book is intended to be critical, as the authors aim to provide students with tools to critique the existing economic orders. Schools of thought that do not query the fundamental logics and processes of capitalism are put on the back-burner.