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Buy this book. Naomi Klein is a careful and thorough researcher who leads us through the maze of corporate domination and individual hubris associated with the past, present and future economic state of our democracy. Buy extra ones for your friends. This is one of the most important books of the last 20 years. What we may have suspected becomes revealed truth. Follow the trail of brigands well known to all of us.
This book is amazing. Meticulously researched - truly - no intellectual dishonesty here. Fiery and direct - it is almost impossible to overstate how important and incisive this book is.
The book open a new door to understand the reality of the power of money in our society and the corruption that create in goberments around the word. It open my eyes to a few realities.
There are so many inaccuracies in this book I don't know where to begin. The "facts" in this book should be taken with a huge handful of salt.
I'm walking away questioning whether and how it could have turned out differently; this is what her book is supposed to convince me of. Many have complained about this and I know I am not alone here - I know these days a book has to have a catch phrase to be popular and all but this analogy is grossly overused. My final take is that this is a book that could have been much more. More often than not, it is a picture of a crisis or disaster occurring and capitalist influence following after the fact.
What I instead got was a gross misinterpretation of free market thought and a demonstration of the evils of corporatism when combined with military and governmental power. Free market logic is often presented as all butterflies and rainbows and I was hoping this book would cover the darkside to this logic, or at least give me a more balanced view of the flip side to the coin. Though I'm quite sure she fully believes her use of it to be completely relevant, another reviewer (Trevor Goodchild) summed it well when he used the phrase "emotionally manipulative." That is exactly how this feels. Do I really need to explain how that is NOT a free market.
This is, in my opinion, one of the weakest arguments in her book.There is some real potential in this work, and her section on Iraq is especially moving. That isn't to say it is irrelevant - not at all - but rather to say I feel she takes an example of something cruel, then ironically uses it to "shock" your emotions into buying into what she said. This isn't something that ruins the book, I suppose more of a stylistic complaint even, but it was persistently present throughout the book and deserves mention.My second and much larger problem with this work is her confusion of a free market with corporatism. She uses the terms completely interchangeably without the slightest hint that they may not be the same thing. To begin with a positive, I was fairly excited about this book.
This too has been addressed numerous times in reviews and discussions of this book: http://www.amazon.com/review/R2Y5HYZ2S30IF/ref=cm_cr_rev_detmd_pl.ie=UTF8&cdMsgNo=27&cdPage=3&cdSort=oldest&cdMsgID=Mx3UQNA20BNE9ZT#Mx3UQNA20BNE9ZTOn a personal note, I also take offense to her outright bashing of charter school's. I myself greatly benefited from a charter school education and in her section on post Katrina re-construction she unabatedly describes their efforts as weak simply because they are privately run. Specifically, it does a good job of giving the impression that much, or even all of the war was highly influenced by corporatist policy. However, this appeal is not consistent throughout the book. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot-all at taxpayer expense" This is a prime example of what a pro free marketeer would be against. This, combined with what I feel an overstretched analogy and seeming Bias resulted in my awarding two stars for the work.My first problem arises with her use of the ECT analogy. This is where my final complaint comes in, and it is one of bias.
A wonderful example of this: ".U.S. Barred competition, guaranteed profits. Specifically, she gives these examples of private organization's failing to respond sufficiently to a disaster and the conclusion then automatically becomes "Well if the government alone would have done it, it would have all been better." Now I am certainly no expert in this field and I want to be clear that my complaint is that it feels like one sided, unbalanced fact presentation. Corporatist influence is most certainly something to be worried about; calling it "free market capitalism" and producing a work that feels coated with bias will do little to curb its influence.
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