Review by Booklist Review
In her 2007 best-seller, The Shock Doctrine, Klein alerted people, as the subtitle put it, to the rise of disaster capitalism. Ten years later, she asserts that the disaster, personified in the Trump administration, is here. Corporations have completed the coup they began decades ago, barely trying to cover the havoc they wreak. Institutions that are supposed to protect the citizenry are shaky. This book, which chronicles how we got where we are, is not going to make anyone suffering from dislocation, even fear, in the era of Trump feel better until, perhaps, the final chapters. There Klein puts forth a progressive agenda that asks people to take a leap forward to counter the dominance-based logic that treats so many people, and the earth itself, as disposable. With current events moving at warp speed, some of the book already seems a bit out-of-date, including the tired arguments about how Bernie Sanders could have beaten Donald Trump (though she does admit that scenario might not have played out after the right wing turned its full force on the senator). Even The Leap, the platform she heralds, which aims to link movements and uses words like redistribution and reparations, echoes 50-year-old Summer of Love tropes. Who and what will win the global war of ideas remain to be seen, but Klein gets the anti-austerity, anti-corporate, pro-community program on the table in a forthright, readable way.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Klein deconstructs the ways in which Donald Trump's presidency represents a culmination of free-market policy, wealth concentration, and media manipulation to create a Frankenstein's monster that has the ability to do harm that will impact the world for generations. She identifies strategies both local and global that people can use to minimize the damage. Marling reads in a soft, smooth voice that draws listeners in most effectively during the more personal parts of the narrative, such as when Klein talks about how she has experienced Trump's rise and early presidency or when discussing her child's future. But Marling falters capturing Klein's command and intensity when delving into the details of Trump's crass antics, economic interests, questionable dealings, and encouragement of white supremacists. Klein's prose hints at anger, disdain, and reproach, but Marling's tone sounds lackadaisical and even passive, which is antithetical to the book's overall message. A Haymarket paperback. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Viewing the Trump-ian train wreck, Intercept senior correspondent Klein (This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2014, etc.) insists that she told us so.Ten years ago, in The Shock Doctrine, the author described the neoliberal project of weakening already feeble economies in the developing world and then looting them, as happened in places such as Chile and Iraq. She considers the unfolding policies of the Trump administration the domestic version of that shock program, an "all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest," and one that no longer bothers to disguise itself behind the "mask on the corporate state's White House proxies" but instead is cheerfully and busily at war with anything that resembles the social contract. Klein is rather too quick to catalog her earlier insights, but her point remains: in a welter of discontent, voters propelled Trump to leadership because they believed his message that he was too wealthy to need the corruption of the system and only he knew how to fix it. Something else is developing, of course. Writes Klein, "he reflects all the worst trends I wrote about in No Logo, from shrugging off responsibility for the workers who make your products via a web of often abusive contractors to the insatiable colonial need to mark every available space with your name." So it would seem. The author spends much of the book describing and decrying the elements of the "corporate coup" that Trump represents, arguments that will be familiar to most of her core readership but are handy to have in one place. More interesting are her planks in an evolving platform of what to do about the mess, from being sure to vote ("yes, I am going to cast a ballot in this deeply flawed and constricted electoral system, but do not mistake that vote as an expression of the world I want") to setting a progressive "reverse shock" in motion. A useful volume in the fast-growing library of resistance, complete with concluding manifesto. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
