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Books & Films — The Shock Doctrine

Description

The Shock Doctrine cracks open the secret history of our era.

An investigation that spans four decades of history, from Chile after Pinochet’s coup to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from Baghdad under the US “Shock and Awe” attack to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. “Shock doctrine” describes the brute tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy.”

Based on breakthrough historical research and four years of on-the-ground reporting in disaster zones, Klein explodes the myth that the global free market triumphed democratically, and that unfettered capitalism goes hand-in-hand with democracy. Instead, she argues it has consistently relied on violence and shock, and reveals the puppet strings behind the critical events of the last four decades.

The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, how the “free market” came to dominate the world — 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 many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq.  A program of social and economic engineering that is driving our world, that Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism”.

Klein vividly traces the origins of modern shock tactics back to the economic lab of the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman in the 60s, and beyond to the CIA-funded electroshock experiments at McGill University in the 50s which helped write the torture manuals used today at Guantanamo Bay.

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. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that 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.

Thrilling and revelatory, The Shock Doctrine cracks open the secret history of our era.  As John Gray wrote in The Guardian, “There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books.”

Get more information about The Shock Doctrine.

Honors & Awards

Warwick Prize for Writing—Winner of the Inaugural prize in 2009

Los Angeles Times Book Prize—Finalist

National Business Book Award of Canada—Finalist

New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism—Finalist

Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards for Author of the Year and Non-Fiction Book of the Year—Finalists

Top Picks and Best Book of the Year

New York Times Critics’ Pick of 2007

San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of the Year

An Amazon Top 10 Editors’ Pick ‘Current Events’ Book of the Year

An Amazon Top 10 Editors’ Pick ‘Business Narrative’ of the Year

Barnes & Noble Top 10 ‘Politics & Current Affairs’ Book of the Year

Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

Quill & Quire Best Book of the Year

Sueddeutsche Zeitung Best Nonfiction Book of the Year

One of The Village Voice‘s 20 Best Books of the Year

One of The Kansas City Star’s Top 100 Books of the Year

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Best Book of the Year

Co-Winner of Alternet‘s Best Progressive Books of 2007 Contest

One of the Dayton Daily News’ Favorite Nonfiction Books of the Year

PopMatters Best Book of 2007

An E! Online Best Pick for 2007

An Observer Favorite Book of the Year

Metro London‘s Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year

The Scotsman‘s Pick of the Year

Sunday Herald Best Book of the Year

An Irish Examiner Best Book of the Year

One of The Chicago Sun-Times Favorite Books of the Year

Sacramento News & Review Top 10 Book of the Year

One of The Seattle Times’ Favorite Books of the Year

One of The Age‘s Favorite Books of the Year

Eugene Weekly Winter Reading Selection

Praise & Reviews
Arundhati Roy

“Brilliant, brave and terrifying. It’s nothing less than the secret history of what we call the ‘free market.’ It should be compulsory reading.”

Newark Star-Ledger

“A towering polemic . . . . Klein is not simply a woman with a bullhorn. A fierce writer whose prose has the metaphorical gusto of Susan Sontag’s in its best moments, Klein manages to weave a narrative out of a large variety of historical events that is equal parts cultural commentary and investigative journalism.”

Jeremy Scahill

The Shock Doctrine is the defining, covert history of our era.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“With a bold and brilliantly conceived thesis, skillfully and cogently threaded through more than 500 pages of trenchant writing, Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time.”

Los Angeles Times

“Klein launches a highly polemical, and persuasive, assault on free-market fundamentalism. She rips into the big-business agenda to show how economic opportunists need and promote misery and disaster, challenging us to look at world-changing events—Pinochet’s coup, Tiananmen Square, the collapse of the Soviet Union, Hurricane Katrina—from a whole other perspective. Not everybody’s going to agree with her, but this is reporting and history-writing in the tradition of Izzy Stone and Upton Sinclair. Klein upends assumptions and demands that we think—her book is thrilling, troubling and very dark.”

Kirkus

“Klein . . . tracks the forced imposition of economic privatization, rife with multinational corporate parasites, on areas and nations weakened by war, civil strife or natural disasters.”

Anthony Shadid

The Shock Doctrine is, simply put, a book without peer, an epic and riveting work whose message must be heard . . . . Honest, urgent and necessary to read . . . an essential book; only Klein could write it.”

New Statesman

“She takes the central myth of the right—that, since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history—and shows that it is, simply, a lie . . . written with a perfectly distilled anger, channelled through hard fact. She has indeed surpassed No Logo. Today, this brilliant book should stir a tsunami of shame—and of political action”

Global sales

Publishing information.

Originally published in 2007, The Shock Doctrine has been published in over 30 languages.

For translation inquiries, please visit Creative Artists Agency.

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