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" In his highly popular “Principles of Economics,” Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw begins by listing a set of ten basic principles, which include “Rational people think at the margin,” “Trade can make everybody better off,” and “Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.”"

That was and is a fine approach, nothing wrong with it. I think one of the principles was "people react to incentives" or something along the line. I think about it often. I think Mankiw's book is great (I have only read the German version, which might differ in details from the US version - for example it uses examples from Germany).

How do I know I can trust this "new economics" textbook? What if it was written by communists or some other ideological group?

I also don't agree that economics did a bad job explaining the 2008 crisis. It's just that people don't want to hear certain economic truths. Also, economists disagree on some things, so it seems odd to say "economics doesn't explain x" - some economists do, others don't.

I am skeptic of anybody whose approach to criticizing modern economics is the rational actor model. Economists know that it is just a model. It is still very useful, and even if real world actors are not rational in the short term, evolution ensures that actions are rational in the long term, for the most part.

All that said, in general of course it is great to make a free economics text book available.