Friday, December 15, 2017

NAOMI KLEIN'S BOOKS

                                    NAOMI KLEIN
Contents
Key statements
Titles in Chronological Order
Books in Chronological Order with Publisher’s Review

Klein, No Is Not Enough.   “…the culture of maximum extraction, of endless grabbing and disposing, has reached some kind of breaking point.  Clearly, it is the culture itself that must be confronted now, and not policy by policy, but at the root” (262).

Klein, This Changes Everything.  “The “real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm.  Only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking free” (63). 
      
Her five books in chronological order
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, 1999 (rev. 2009)
Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, 2002
Shock Doctrine: the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, 2007
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, 2014
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, 2017
And a DVD:  Disaster Capitalism

KLEIN’S FIVE BOOKS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER EACH ACCOMPANIED BY A BRIEF PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION
Altogether her five books press upon us a large-scale condemnation of US “neo-liberal” (unregulated) capitalism and offer a vision of a sustainable world.
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies.   1999.  10th Anniversary Edition with a New Introduction by the Author by Naomi Klein. 2nd ed. 2009.  544pp.    NO LOGO was an international bestseller and "a movement bible" (The New York Times).
In the last decade, No Logo has become an international phenomenon and a cultural manifesto for the critics of unfettered capitalism worldwide. As America faces a second economic depression, Klein's analysis of our corporate and branded world is as timely and powerful as ever.
Equal parts cultural analysis, political manifesto, mall-rat memoir, and journalistic exposé, No Logo is the first book to put the new resistance into pop-historical and clear economic perspective. Naomi Klein tells a story of rebellion and self-determination in the face of our new branded world.

FENCES AND WINDOWS: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization DebateMacmillan, Picador, 2002. 
304 Pages

Named one of Ms Magazine's Women of Year in 2001, and declared by the Times (London) to be "probably the most influential person under the age of 35 in the world," in Fences and Windows, Naomi Klein offers a bird's-eye view of the life of an activist and the development of the "anti-globalization" movement from the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999 through September 11, 2001. Bringing together columns, speeches, essays, and reportage, Klein once again provides provocative arguments on a broad range of issues. Whether she is discussing the privatization of water; genetically modified food; "free trade;" or the development of the movement itself and its future post 9/11, Naomi Klein is one of the most thoughtful and brilliant activists and thinkers for a new generation.

Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.  Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2007.
In this groundbreaking alternative history of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free-market economic revolution, Naomi Klein challenges the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory. From Chile in 1973 to Iraq today, Klein shows how Friedman and his followers have repeatedly harnessed terrible shocks and violence to implement their radical policies. 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."
The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (DVD)  This riveting hour-long lecture and interview explains the ideas and research behind Naomi Klein's book that exposed the popular myth of the free market economy's peaceful global victory.    Sale price: $9.98

This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate.    Simon and Schuster, 2014.
Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Observer Book of the Year,
New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year
Forget everything you think you know about global warming. The really inconvenient truth is that it’s not about carbon—it’s about capitalism. The convenient truth is that we can seize this existential crisis to transform our failed economic system and build something radically better.
In her most provocative book yet, Naomi Klein, author of the global bestsellers The Shock Doctrine and No Logo, tackles the most profound threat humanity has ever faced: the war our economic model is waging against life on earth.
Klein exposes the myths that are clouding the climate debate.

We have been told the market will save us, when in fact the addiction to profit and growth is digging us in deeper every day. We have been told it’s impossible to get off fossil fuels when in fact we know exactly how to do it—it just requires breaking every rule in the “free-market” playbook: reining in corporate power, rebuilding local economies, and reclaiming our democracies.
We have also been told that humanity is too greedy and selfish to rise to this challenge. In fact, all around the world, the fight for the next economy and against reckless extraction is already succeeding in ways both surprising and inspiring.
Climate change, Klein argues, is a civilizational wake-up call, a powerful message delivered in the language of fires, floods, storms, and droughts. Confronting it is no longer about changing the light bulbs. It’s about changing the world—before the world changes so drastically that no one is safe. 

Either we leap—or we sink.
Once a decade, Naomi Klein writes a book that redefines its era. No Logo did so for globalization. The Shock Doctrine changed the way we think about austerity. This Changes Everything is about to upend the debate about the stormy era already upon us.  (I sent you my analysis of this book when we discussed it.  –Dick)

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.  Haymarket, 2017.  
Bottom of Form
“This is one attempt to uncover how we got to this surreal political moment. It is also an attempt to predict how, under cover of shocks and crises, it could get a lot worse. And it’s a plan for how, if we keep our heads, we might just be able to flip the script and arrive at a radically better future.”
–From the Introduction

Donald Trump’s takeover of the White House is a dangerous escalation in a world of cascading crises. His reckless agenda—including a corporate coup in government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy—will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment.

Acclaimed journalist, activist, and bestselling author Naomi Klein has spent two decades studying political shocks, climate change, and “brand bullies.” From this unique perspective, she argues that Trump is not an aberration but a logical extension of the worst, most dangerous trends of the past half-century—the very conditions that have unleashed a rising tide of white nationalism the world over. It is not enough, she tells us, to merely resist, to say “no.” Our historical moment demands more: a credible and inspiring “yes,” a roadmap to reclaiming the populist ground from those who would divide us—one that sets a bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.

This timely, urgent book from one of our most influential thinkers offers a bracing positive shock of its own, helping us understand just how we got here, and how we can, collectively, come together and heal.
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the international bestsellers No LogoThe Shock Doctrine, and most recently This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. In 2017 she joined The Intercept as Senior Correspondent.


OMNI AND NAOMI KLEIN
     For a decade OMNI’s Climate Book Forum has studied the causes and consequences of CO2 warming.   Generally we have followed a policy of modest understatement, which I think all of us thought appropriate to the complexity of issues for (mainly) non-scientists.  The result is, we have taken time to prepare to be a public voice.   Now that voice is needed.   For during that time, climatic and environmental conditions have worsened dramatically, and the worst imaginable person has gained presidential power.   I trust you will join me in choosing to ratchet up our voice and to make our Book Forum known and felt in our community.  
      Our publicity has improved.  We are discussing our books more deeply.  We are preparing to give Joe Romm’s introduction to warming special public attention as an addition to our Forum.   We are connecting  these scholarly books to each other and to politics better.     (I return again and again to Hansen’s Storms of my Grandchildren, which was crucially important to me for revealing in one narrative both the science and the repressive politics of warming under President Bush.  The impeachment of President Trump is being discussed at all levels.)   In many ways we are making our voice heard.
    Naomi Klein offers her voice as megaphone.     She has written five books, each of which is significant on its own but which together provide a potent analysis of the US economic system.   (I have not read Fences and Windows but I assume it affirms her other books.)
     No Logo and Shock Doctrine analyze two major aspects of US capitalism: expansion of growth for profit by advertising, and opportunities for profit provided by imperial and natural disasters.
     In This Changes Everything, at the end of chapter one, she presents her radical central thesis:  “…the real reason we are failing to rise to the climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning economic paradigm …, the stories on which Western cultures are founded…, as well as many of the activities that form our identities and define our communities. . . .They also spell extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has ever known—the oil and gas industry….In short, we have not responded to this challenge because we are locked in—politically, physically, and culturally.  Only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking free” (63).
      From her perspective of two decades of studying “ecocidal capitalism”-- the “brand bullies” of advertising, the bullet bullies of empire, and the corporatism that drives them--, in No Is Not Enough Klein perceives Donald Trump as their inevitable extension, “a logical conclusion…of pretty much all the worst trends of the past half century” (9).   But our knowledge of this dark reality is the rock on which we can stand and resist, a foundation for an alternative economic system and world, condensed into “The Leap Manifesto” printed in full at the end.
     Let us publicize Naomi Klein and her five books (and many essays unmentioned above) as an authoritative guidebook to resisting the chaos of extreme weather through her system of values and methods. 

Dick

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