The New Naomi Klein Rave

You want to watch something that'll get you thinking? Well, then check out this short 7-minute film by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein about Naomi's new book "The Shock Doctrine" and learn all about "disaster capitalism" and its greatest proponent, that nasty Milton Friedman, friend and advisor to Thatcher, Reagan and, yes, even Pinochet.

If you like the film and, like myself, don't yet have a copy of the book, you can read more at The Guardian's special "Shock Doctrine" site here.

My copy of the book is on its way in the mail. And if you're saying to yourself that you can't afford the hardcover edition and, therefore, you'll just have to wait a few months for the release of the paperback, I've got some good news for you. Amazon.ca is selling the hardcover version right now at exactly half price. And half price is a nice price, whether you be an angel of truth like Naomi or a demon of misery like Milton Friedman.

Also, check out  "Shock Wave Troopers", a combined interview/review that appeared earlier this month in The Georgia Straight. Or, better yet, read this great interview from Macleans: "Why Capitalism Needs Terror: An Interview with Naomi Klein".

Anyway you look at it, it sure sounds like a good read. Whether you're a fan of her first book, "No Logo", or of "The Take", the great film she made together with her husband, Avi Lewis, you probably already know that Naomi rocks. Unless, that is, you're a fan of Milt, Pinochet and their ilk, in which case you'll probably want to steer well clear of this new book and keep up your vigil for "I'm The Biggest Dick" or whatever Cheney's autobiography is going to be called.

And if you need any more convincing that this - rather than Dick's - is a book worth picking up, here are a few of the early rave reviews:

"Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell."
—John le Carre

"Naomi Klein is one of the most important new voices in American journalism today, as this book make clear. She has turned globalism inside out, and in so doing given all of us a new way of looking at our seemingly unending disaster in Iraq, and a new way of understanding why we got there."
—Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer prize winning investigative journalist for The New Yorker

"This beautifully written, very readable book will change the disgusting history it so calmly chronicles"
—Peter Carey, author of Oscar and Lucinda and Theft: A Love Story

"Naomi Klein is in the best tradition of I.F. Stone and Upton Sinclair, a muckraker who digs in where others accept the surface. I love her stuff and as a 20th Century man, I salute a 21st Century woman."
—Studs Terkel, historian and author of Working

"A revelation! With unparalleled courage and clarity Naomi Klein has written the most important and necessary book of her generation. In it she exposes liars, murderers and thieves, ripping the lid off the Chicago School economic policy and its connection to the chaos and bloodshed around the world. The Shock Doctrine is so important and so revelatory a book that it could very well prove a catalyst, a watershed, a tipping point in the movement for economic and social justice."
—Tim Robbins

"Naomi Klein is an investigative reporter like no other. She roams the continents with eyes wide open and her brain operating at full speed, finding connections we never thought of, and patterns which eluded us. She shows us, in clear and elegant language, how catastrophes -- natural ones like Katrina, unnatural ones like war -- become opportunities for a savage capitalism, calling itself “the free market,” to privatize everything in sight, bringing huge profits to some, misery for others. To ensure the safety of such a system, it becomes necessary to constrict freedom, to assault human rights. The torture chambers for some then match the torturing of the larger society. This is a brilliant book, one of the most important I have read in a long time."
—Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United State

"Naomi Klein has written a brilliant, brave and terrifying book. It's nothing less than the secret history of what we call the 'Free Market'. It should be compulsory reading."
—Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things

"Naomi Klein as a writer is an accusing angel. This life-saving book, packed with thinking dynamite, provokes and instills a calm. It reveals a striking parallel between CIA prisoner interrogation technique and the blackmailing technique of the World Bank and I.M.F. for imposing disaster capitalism across the world; both want to induce by shocks a loss of identity. Hence calm is a form of resistance. A book to be read everywhere."
—John Berger, author of G, winner of the Booker Prize, and Ways of Seeing

Enjoy the book! Half price or not, it sure sounds like it's well worth picking up.

Mike Cowie (Oredakedo)
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007