Naomi Klein Books

This book contains superb comments on strategies, policies and mass demonstrations against the actual way of the world. It poses the right questions (who holds power? who exercises it? who disguises it?) and the right answers (people before profits).

The way of the world
For Naomi Klein, the world is dominated by transnational corporations and investors, who control governments. These governments respond to the needs of the former, not of the people who elected them: affordable housing, medicines, clean water, clean land, basic food, education, sustainable energy sources and independent scientific research.
As someone in Prague said, `communism and capitalism have something in common. They both centralize power in the hands of a few.' Globalization and free trade are corporate-driven. The wealth liberated by them is stuck at the top. For the rest, there is wage stagnation, erosion of basic services, of freedom and civil liberties.

Strategies
Resistance to biased free trade and its globalization should not occur within a big unified movement, a coordinated centralization, because it would in the shortest of time being `incorporated by special interests'. Small units of activists, independent groups should focus on simple, crucial issues. Only those can be effective.

Policies
The policies should focus on the application of universal human rights, real democracy, labor and ecological rights and records, civil liberties, freedom of speech (internet) and independent research (e.g., Frankenstein food).
The IMF(ired) and the World Bank should fiercely be attacked or their doctrine, which takes power away from communities, give it to a central government, who gives it to the corporations through privatization (V.Shiva).
Another target should be the WTO, which dead seriously makes trade-related intellectual property rights its focus point in the face of billions of hungry people.

This extremely hard-hitting book (`for Kamikaze Capitalists, terrorism is just another opportunity to leverage') is a must read for all those wanting to save the planet and mankind.

More for the person already familiar with the movement, IMO. Great collection of speeches and essays though. I ran through it pretty quick.

Early last year I added myself to the Naomi Klein fan club - unfortunately I did not discover her sooner.

Since then I've read many of her books, checked out some web sites and seen her interviewed by Charlie Rose.

What a welcome phenomenon to the world of intellectual stimulus. Inteligent, focussed, clear, consistent, beautiful...

As I dwell in marketing, branding and creative consulting and coaching, Naomi Klein challenges my focus when I look into the mirror - a welcome discomfort to check my integrity.

Social Democratic-Liberal rubbish. From a family of professional activists herself, Klein has become a jet-setting "anti-globalisation" politician, though she disagrees with the term "anti-globalisation." Instead, she calls for a lefist soft internationalism:

"When protesters shout about the evils of globalization, most are not calling for a return to narrow nationalism but for the borders of globalization to be expanded, for trade to be linked to labour rights, environmental protection and democracy."


Hmm... So, like, capitalism without the nasty stuff? Like a good left-liberal, Klein not only defends "good" trade from "bad" trade, but also talks about"labour rights" along with a plethora of other "concerns" of protesters, along with saving the trees, whales, cute little bunnies, etc. In fact, the "labour rights" rhetoric is on a par with "animal rights" (!) rhetoric. And anti-racism. Save some exotic butterfly, oh and while you're at it, heck, let's save those poor, helpless peasants and proles. Them too! Activists demand victims to save just as they demand wrongs to right.

Ok, ok, I don't like activists - in psychological terms, their constant need for activity, which manifests as something approaching a nervous disorder, could perhaps be described what the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich called "orgastic impotency." And in fact, Klein recognises that "demonstrations themselves aren't a movement" and takes on board the criticism that the anti-globalisation movement has turned into "McProtest." No, Miss Klein wants to build a movement out of the messy wreck of single-issue activism that is called the "anti-corporate" movement. She asks, "...how do you hold a protest against abstract economic ideas without sounding hideously strident or all over the map?" It has, of course, been tried - e.g. the Campaign Against Capitalism in London in 1999, and hilarity and disillusionment with activism has followed.

So once this whole "anti-corporate" circus has moved on, what of the workers of the world? I suggest we all turn elsewhere. Instead of being victims to be screwed-over by business, or being "saved" by activists, working people need to organise for themselves. For those in America, Australia, Great Britain, Australia, Germany, and France: check out the syndicalist union the Industrial Workers of the World (iww.org).

Fences and Windows is an interesting read but much of its content seems both reactionary and propagandic. There is little coverage of the actual 'meat' to the issue of globalization. Instead this book gives the reader little snippets of information (ie: Some really interesting protester was arrested) which lack much intellectual value. Overall, the book is an interesting read but provides little additional information to the globalization discourse.

I read this book for an American Studies course, and I found it very insightful. It's a lengthy book, and I couldn't put it down.

As an expert in the marketing field, I find this book refreshing. Ms. Klein's research is self-evident and easy to digest while putting many things into perspective. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. In fact, working in the marketing industry, I hesitate to recommend it to my peers because of it's inherent power and insight. I can't believe there are no other reviews... BUY THIS BOOK!

On my version on page 11, there is a little graph that purportedly shows how advertising has taken over the world in the last twenty years.
The numbers are startling; from a figure of just fifty billion dollars in the late 1970s to a figure of 200 billion dollars in the late 1990s. This compared to a figure of just 4 billion in 1960. The only problem you see, is that she has not (or at least not as far I can see), either taken into account inflation or the growth in GDP during this time. So if GDP and inflation together had averaged 7 per cent a year for twenty years (which seems reasonable), then it stands to reason that advertising expenditure would increase four times. Now if this was some throwaway aspect of the book, not really all that important, then it may not matter, unfortunately it is the premise behind the entire story. If real advertising expenditure has not increased during the last twenty years, then on what grounds would you write a book decrying the explosion in advertising? In other words, either I and my friends are wrong and missed some important labels or the book is a complete fraud.
The other important point is that if advertising expenditure was 4 billion in 1960 and 50 billion in 1980, then surely the rate of growth during this period was far greater than in the next twenty years?
What can I say, but this book is unbelievably stupid. The entire style of the book is taking unrepresentative examples and trying to flog them off as representing all advertising behaviour. Not only that half of her examples hardly amount to any sort of malfeasance on the part of corporations anyway, some of the heinous crimes they commit amount to employing black people (Nike hiring Tiger Woods), and selling goods at a cheaper rate (Wal-Mart). At one point she castigates a security guard for not being up to date on his Ayn Rand; talk about a strawman, this author actually believes that if she can outsmart the average security guard, this somehow makes her arguments airtight. This book reminds me of Michel Foucault, lots and lots of facts, and stories and gripping yarns, all thoroughly researched, but the stories just simply don't say what the author wants them to say, and even if they did, they only constitute a small and non-random sample anyway. To be fair, Foucault was ten times more brilliant than Klein, and he would never have forgotten to include inflation in time series data.
But I think the worst part of this book, is its outright refusal to contemplate the other side of the argument. When you want to write a polemic then you give your own side of the argument and then try to refute as best you can the relevant arguments of the other side. The counter argument to Klein's polemic is that brands combat a phenomenon called asymmetric information. If I do not know the quality of a particular product a priori, and somebody can demonstrate credibly (say by advertising) that they have a vested interest in the quality of the product then I am likely to pay a premium price in order to have the "guarantee" of quality. This is because I, like most people am risk averse. This is one of the main reasons that we have brands, there are other reasons to advertise of course but this is one argument that Klein does not try to refute at all.

Don't waste your time with this book. Klein was a pampered brat growing up in an affluent society and her guilt trip led her to write a book that would normally have died a quick death if it weren't for the fact that left has gotten hold of her as their poster girl.
The arguments are weak and the book, though entertaining at times, reads like something a high school student, hoping to impress her teacher, would have written.
Don't buy it.

This new anthology is intended an introductory text for college students. While it contains a number of thought-provoking essays, it has has some significant flaws. Namely, few of the articles focus primarily on gender issues, and not at all on sexuality. Nevertheless, the book could prove useful in the classroom if accompanied by photocopied articles on these and related topics.

More diatribe from the left, which should be a title of a chapter in Klein's silly short book on the Iraq War. She has more political hang ups than a dry cleaner. She simply is out of touch with reality, and is driven insane by emotional outbursts that destroy any effort at objectivity. Some of her arguments in this, and other efforts, are so ridiculous that it's hard to imagine anyone ever giving her an audience. It's truly the blind leading the blinder. Read this book if nothing more than to see how bankrupt the anti-war movement is.

I saw Naomi Klein speak last month where she said she was working on a new book about Iraq that we could expect in about a year. I was suprised to see it here this early, especially since it's only 96 pages long! Turns out that this is not a new book at all -- her website says that it's just an article from Harper's magazine that has been published as a book without her consent (it's a long article, but 96 pages sounds like a stretch. The font size probably reads like a children's book). She says she has nothing to do with this book and encourages people to instead read the entire article for FREE on her website.

I saw Naomi Klein speak last month where she said she was working on a new book about Iraq that we could expect in about a year. I was suprised to see it here this early, especially since it's only 96 pages long! Turns out that this is not a new book at all -- her website says that it's just an article from Harper's magazine that has been published as a book without her consent (it's a long article, but 96 pages sounds like a stretch. The font size probably reads like a children's book). She says she has nothing to do with this book and encourages people to instead read the entire article for FREE on her website.

"No War" by the way its cover is designed gives the illusion of being a new book by Naomi Klein. I can assure you that it is not. Don't waste your money on it. It is simply a repackaged version of something that Klein has been offering for free on her website for months. It originally was an article that appeared in Harper's magazine entitled: "Baghdad Year Zero." I am the photographer that traveled to Iraq with Klein and took the pictures to illustrate the story, so I know. Don't buy this book and support an unethical publisher who in their own small minded way are trying to profit off of the war in a microcosm of the same way that is described in Klein's writing about the original war profiteers. Instead, go to nologo.org, Klein's website, and read her statement about this book, where you can download this article for free.

I saw this book at Chapters and immediately grabbed it, of course not suspecting a thing because Chapters can do no wrong. Now I find out that it's a fake and the article has been up for months and so on. Seeing as the legitimacy of this "book" has been beaten to death in the previous reviews, I'm not going to say much else on the matter.

That aside, it is an interesting article. Just don't buy the book to read it.