The Shock Doctrine

“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.”
“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 of 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.”
“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.”
“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. And she does it in a lucid, reader-friendly style that almost makes it fun to read.”
“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.”
“Naomi Klein's exposé of neo-liberal economics is certain to be sensational. She rips away the ‘free trade’ and globalization ideologies that disguise a conspiracy to privatize war and disaster and grab public property for the rich few. She is brilliant on the malevolent influence of Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago's Economics Department in promoting global privatization. She offers an excellent explanation for the failure to repair New Orleans after Katrina. Hers is a long-needed analysis of our headlong flight back to feudalism under the guise of social science and “freedom.”
“This beautifully written, very readable book will change the disgusting history it so calmly chronicles”
“Klein traces the history of several intertwined phenomena (free market ideology, artificially induced social and economic crises, torture, privatization, and enhanced inequality) from the Second World War until now, and her argument is well-documented, logical, riveting, and convincing.”
“This masterful book is a measured but furious call to arms. Naomi Klein is Antigone before the King, the antidote to the feeling of inevitability that says that we must accept murder as a legitimate economic policy. She has the audacity to actually believe in justice and the courage to chronicle the human costs of an ideology in which worshiping the markets is not enough; you must actually kill to feed them. Klein is the vanguard, the fire, the resistance and she challenges us not to join the suicide club that enables corporate cannibalism. A spectacular triumph.”
“The Shock Doctrine is, simply put, a book without peer, an epic and riveting work whose message must be heard. With the persistence of a journalist, in the best sense of the word, and the rigor of a scholar, in its truest incarnation, Naomi Klein offers nothing short of a new paradigm for understanding politics in today’s entropic world, where tragedy rarely results by chance. Her book is honest, urgent and necessary to read. Through its eloquent writing, searing analysis and remarkable breadth, we confront the hubris and zealotry of envisioning a blank slate and being left, time and again, with a scorched earth. The Shock Doctrine is an essential book; only Klein could write it.”
“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.
“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.”