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Kirkus Reviews:

Klein (Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, 2002, etc.) tracks the forced imposition of economic privatization, rife with multinational corporate parasites, on areas and nations weakened by war, civil strife or natural disasters. The author follows John Perkins (Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, 2004) and others in pointing an alarmed finger at a global "corporatocracy" that combines the worst features of big business and small government. The difference is that Klein's book incorporates an amount of due diligence, logical structure and statistical evidence that others lack. As a result, she is persuasive when she links past and present events, including the war in Iraq and trashing of its economy, to the systematic march of laissez-faire capitalism and the downsizing of the public sector as both a worldview and a political methodology. Klein fully establishes the influence of U.S. economist Milton Friedman, who died in November 2006, as champion of the free-market transformations that occurred initially in South America, where Friedmanite minions trained at the University of Chicago in the 1960s worked their wiles on behalf of some of the 20th century's most repressive regimes. On to China's Tiananmen Square, then to the collapsed Soviet Union, where oligarchs soared and the underclass was left to starve in the 1990s. More recent developments include forcing private development on the tsunami-ravaged beachfronts of South Asia and junking the public-school system in favor of private charter schools in post-Katrina New Orleans. Just as provocative is Klein's analysis of the Bush administration's rampant outsourcing of U.S. governmentresponsibilities, including the entire "homeland security industry," to no-bid corporate contractors and their expense-laden chains of subcontractors. Her account of that methodology's consequences in Iraq, as mass unemployment coincided with the disbanding of a standing army whose soldiers took their guns home, leaves little doubt as to why there is an enduring insurgency. Required reading for anyone trying to pierce the complexities of globalization.

The Shock Doctrine is the damning Truth Commission the powerful have sought to keep locked away in the Guantanamo prison of history. Naomi Klein has smashed the padlock of secrecy and revealed the violent contents within. She masterfully exposes the dark roots of the staples of today's borderless bloody war: torture, economic terror, disaster profiteering and international conquest. Klein traces the doctrine of shock, applied across the globe from Latin America to the Soviet Union to Africa and the Arab world, through more than half a century of refining by evil geniuses who have used the poor of the world as their lab rats. The Shock Doctrine will change forever how you see the epic battle between the haves and the have nots. This is the defining, covert history of our era. This extraordinary expose is the work of a journalist embedded not with the militaries of the powerful, but with the poor, the tortured and those who fight for justice against all odds.

Jeremy Scahill
Author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army

The list of progressive luminaries praising Naomi Klein and her newest book is long. Klein -- who came to international attention with her tome on globalization, branding and marketing, "No Logo" -- is one of our favorite "big picture" political analysts. Based in Toronto, she is a Canadian born of leftist American parents who has become one of the most innovative, research-based, and powerful thinkers to come to dissect the destructive impact of the Milton Friedman/right wing globalization school of economics.

But her most important disctinction is that she keenly understands how the so-called free market -- which is really a rigged economy for large corporations as it is currently playing itself out -- impacts individuals around the world on a daily basis. "No Logo" offered a prescient insight into the role of branding and cheap labor in creating international market forces. It was the intellectual progressive counterpoint to the triumphant age of the Nike swoosh and brand-identity consumerism run amuck.

In "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism," Klein offers a longer and more comprehensive frontal assault on an economic system that thrives on consuming the lives of all those who sacrifice themselves for the few at the top of the econonimic pyramid.

Just being released, "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" is already raising the ire of World Bank types and mainstream media business reporters. Suffice it to say that Naomi Klein doesn't have any patience for "triangulators" as she filets the spread of a neo-feudalistic economic order.

Klein is only 37, but she has a passion for ideas that reminds one of the great philosphical debates over economics and politics that occurred in Europe in the last century. Yet, she is every bit a modernist in understanding our current condition.

A rare combination indeed.

From Naomi Klein's website (naomiklein.org):

"In THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, Naomi Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically. Exposing the thinking, the money trail and the puppet strings behind the world-changing crises and wars of the last four decades, The Shock Doctrine is the gripping story of how America's "free market" policies have come to dominate the world-- through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.

At the most chaotic juncture in Iraq's civil war, a new law is unveiled that would allow Shell and BP to claim the country's vast oil reserves. Immediately following September 11, the Bush Administration quietly out-sources the running of the "War on Terrorism" to Halliburton and Blackwater. After a tsunami wipes out the coasts of Southeast Asia, the pristine beaches are auctioned off to tourist resorts.... New Orleans�s residents, scattered from Hurricane Katrina, discover that their public housing, hospitals and schools will never be reopened�. These events are examples of "the shock doctrine": using the public's disorientation following massive collective shocks, wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters -- to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy. Sometimes, when the first two shocks don't succeed in wiping out resistance, a third shock is employed: the electrode in the prison cell or the Taser gun on the streets.

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism "the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock" did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today. New, surprising connections are drawn between economic policy, "shock and awe" warfare and covert CIA-funded experiments in electroshock and sensory deprivation in the 1950s, research that helped write the torture manuals used today in Guantanamo Bay.

The Shock Doctrine follows the application of these ideas though our contemporary history, showing in riveting detail how well-known events of the recent past have been deliberate, active theatres for the shock doctrine, among them: Pinochetï's coup in Chile in 1973, the Falklands War in 1982, the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Asian Financial crisis in 1997 and Hurricane Mitch in 1998."


From the publisher, Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt:

"The bestselling author of No Logo shows how the global "free market" has exploited crises and shock for three decades, from Chile to Iraq.

In her groundbreaking reporting over the past few years, Naomi Klein introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment," losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.

At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years."

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