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What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self―a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience―she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?
Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us―and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.
Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now―and an intellectual adventure story for our times.
"[Naomi Klein's] provocative thought exercise illuminates the myriad ways taken-for-granted balances can be upended and calls for heightened awareness of the dangers of identity erosion on both large and small scales." ―Booklist (starred review)
"[A] striking meditation ... Klein's writing is perceptive and intriguingly personal ... By articulating such an expansive view of the uncanny, Klein's mesmerizing narrative reflects the unique anxieties and modes of analysis that have come to dominate the online era. Like Klein's previous books, it's a definitive signpost of the times." ―Publishers Weekly
"Klein's prose is tight and urgent ... evoking both laughter and dismay and entrancingly matching the mounting frenzy of seeing your public self morph into someone else ... [Klein's] comprehensive and nuanced treatments of these issues are valuable and compelling ... A disarming and addictive call to solidarity." ―Kirkus Reviews
"No recent book has better captured the absurdities and perils of the current moment in politics and culture and digital life than Doppelganger." ―Vulture
"A compelling and far-reaching political detective story ... Especially when it comes to the political fallout from the pandemic, no other book I know of has been this intellectually adventurous, this loopily personal, or this entertaining ... As a writer and a theorist, Klein is particularly talented at knitting together the sweep of history and the banalities of the present. She's equally attuned to what Doppelgängers can mean in a more transhistorical sense." ―Laura Kipnis, The Nation
"Insightful ... [Doppelganger is] the most introspective and whimsical of Klein's books to date, but it is also one of surprising insights, unexpected connections and great subtlety." ―William Davies, The Guardian
"For nearly a quarter century, Klein's work has offered clarifying conceptual frameworks to understand the workings of power ... [Klein] has a canny knack for capturing the zeitgeist, crystalizing ideas attuned to a given historical moment that serve to galvanize activists as much as scholars." ―Nico Baumbach, Bookforum
"[Klein] is famous for the calm and poise with which she mainstreams a clear, solidly leftist political-economic critique ... Doppelganger is both more literary and more personal than Klein's other books. She reads Freud and Poe and Ursula Le Guin and Dostoevsky ... Klein's purpose is to use her doppelganger adventures as 'a narrow aperture' into [...] an alternative-media ecosystem." ―Jenny Turner, London Review of Books
"A dazzling, hallucinatory tour de force that takes the reader through shadow selves and global fascism, leaving them gasping by the end." ―Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood
"Naomi Klein's books have been building one on the next to create a powerful cognitive mapping of our time. This new book takes a personal turn, then opens out into an analysis of our shared global dilemma that is as incisive and fascinating as anything she has ever written―which is saying a lot. As always, my first thought on finishing one of her books is Thank you." ―Kim Stanley Robinson, author of The Ministry for the Future
"I finished this book and nearly cried with relief. Klein gave me the gift of being calm. She explores and diagnoses with empathy, warmth and searing precision the confusion and utter madness of what it is to be alive right now. This is a big book with big ideas which poses the most direct questions for our times. Everyone needs to read it as a matter of urgency." ―Sheena Patel, author of I'm a Fan
This information about Doppelganger was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international bestseller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Translated into 28 languages and with more than a million copies in print, The New York Times called No Logo "a movement bible." In 2000, The Guardian Newspaper short-listed it for its First Book Award, and in 2001, No Logo won the Canadian National Business Book Award, and the French Prix Médiations. She is also the author of Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is an international bestseller and was published worldwide in September 2007. Additionally, she was a contributor to both Wrestling with Zion: ...
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