Select Blog Reviews

Crooks & Liars Book of the Month: The Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 05:00:00 +0000

January 19th, 2008

Mark Groubert, Crooks and Liars, January 19, 2008

Men like Jonas Salk, Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, these men thrive upon the continuance of segregation, violence, and disease. The purity they dost protest a need for, they dost feed upon. Thank You, Masked Man.
- Lenny Bruce

The Year of the Naomis

Naomi Klein — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 05:00:00 +0000

November 26th, 2007

Excerpt from Jim Freeman, OpEdNews.com, November 26, 2007

Naomi Klein, on the other hand, dispels any notions you may have had about the CIA and its usefulness as a tool in the belt of American democracy.

A Canadian journalist, Klein ruthlessly and in agonizingly researched detail, carries us through Milton Friedman’s Chicago School of nation building. Klein has done the legwork, so we needn’t tromp our way up and down the dusty corridors, lined with closet after closet, ringing with the cries of the tortured, the disappeared, the silenced witnesses to grand theft of their countries.

Klein Attacks; Reason Magazine Goes AWOL

Naomi Klein — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 05:00:00 +0000

November 18th, 2007

Alexander Zaitchik, The Exile, November 18, 2007

“So who's reviewing Naomi Klein's searing indictment of that bloodthirsty scoundrel Milton Friedman? I read a few pages in the store, and it appears he was little more than a bookwormy Jim Jones.”

Book Review: Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine"

Naomi Klein — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 04:00:00 +0000

October 14th, 2007

SusanG, Daily Kos, October 14, 2007

... the [Milton Friedman] Chicago School strain of capitalism does indeed have something in common with other dangerous ideologies: the signature desire for unattainable purity, for a clean slate on which to build a reengineered model society.

**

Far from freeing the market from the state, these political and corporate elites have simply merged, trading favors to secure the right to appropriate precious resources previously held in the public domain—from Russia’s oil fields, to China’s collective lands, to the no-bid reconstruction contracts for work in Iraq.
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Naomi Klein, Friedman Fighter

Naomi Klein — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 04:00:00 +0000

October 1st, 2007

Rick Simonson, Publisher Weekly's blog, October 1, 2007

It was a Thursday night (this past), Seattle's Town Hall, an audience of over 700 gathered. After being introduced, Naomi Klein came to the microphone, made gracious acknowledging remarks, and then cited the applause in the room that burst out when the Seattle anti-WTO demonstrations of November 30, 1999 were mentioned. The spirit of those demonstrations, the public protest and stand against virtually unmitigated corporate rule over the sovereignty of other countries and other people within those countries (including our own), were much the spirit she wanted to tap into with the new book she was there to speak of, her brilliant,damning The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Metropolitan).

New Books By Alan Greenspan and Naomi Klein: One is Prophetic, One is Pathetic

Naomi Klein — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 04:00:00 +0000

September 25th, 2007

Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post, September 25, 2007

A fascinating dispute on modern economics -- and the dominant role it plays in our politics - is currently taking place in America's bookstores.

On one side is Alan Greenspan, whose The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World offers his usual free market uber alles philosophy, while attempting to rehabilitate his tattered image (which is worth about as much as the U.S. dollar these days).

On the other side is Naomi Klein, whose The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism offers an alternative economic history of the last 30 years and, using the war in Iraq as a mind-blowing example, pulls the curtain back on free market myths and exposes the forces that are really driving our economy.

Klein's book is powerful and prophetic. Greenspan's is pitiful and pathetic.