Customer Reviews:
 A MUST READ! November 24, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
My first copy of "THE SHOCK DOCTRINE, the rise of disaster capitalism" by Naomi Klein was a gift from a friend.
After i had read 3 chapters i wanted EVERYONE to read it because it goes to the roots of the current economic meltdown.
It is very well written..a 'page turner' and truly shocking about what it reveals the U.S. the IMF and the WORLD BANK have done around the world since the '70s causing immense suffering and bloodshed in forcing poor countries to have 'FREE MARKETS"
I have already given away 11 copies and just bought 5 more to give away.
It's a MUST READ if you want to understand our current economic problems.
Putting it all together November 23, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
This is a remarkable book. Although I understood a lot of the things that Klein talks about in her book, I had never put it all together into a whole before. I feel like I understand what the battle lines really mean now, much better than before. Far better, she explains why these things have been obscured--e.g., why we haven't understood the necessary relationship of the conservative theories of Milton Friedman and the brutal policies of torture in those countries that have put those theories into effect. We have treated the totalitarian policies of torture as a humanitarian issue and economic theories as a choice between two competing economic theories. This book is a tour de force in bringing together historical facts in various places (Chile, Argentina, Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iraq, England, and now the U.S.) with the economic wars that are being fought on many levels throughout the world. Despite its sometimes repetitive nature (it could have been edited into at least 2/3 of its present size), I think this is the most important book I've read in the last two years. I think/thought that Kevin Phillips, AMERICAN THEOCRACY, was an extremely important book a few years ago--this is even more significant, and I recommend it without qualification.
Required Reading November 22, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I have known, for a long time that we were not the guys in the white hats, but this book is a true eye opener.It is as horrifying as it informative.
It should be required reading for all high school students in order that they not be lulled into the compacency of their parents generation.
Is the end of Shock & Awe coming? November 20, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
This is a well souced book about American style capitalism and how destructive to the world it has been, a horrific failure of tremendous scope--that is if the intention was to lift the people of the world up to a better quality of life. Klein lays the blame on Milton Friedman, a U. of Chicago economist. The author deliniates the strategy and the tactics through real world example after real world example. The question becomes: How was this possible? How can a few men, with very bad ideas, dominate the world to the accumulation of their personal wealth, at the expense of the great majority of people, under the guise of democracy? Answer: Through fear, lies, torture, state and intimate terrorism and; dare I say, greed, antisocial, and narcissistic behaviors. This happened not once--but time and time again, right on up through the disaster that is Iraq and the rebuilding of New Orleans. What is truly troubling is that this happened with the world watching and was, in fact, the policy of America. There are believers. And, if you are one of the beneficiaries of this policy then you probably don't care. Do you care now?
 A thoroughly discredited heap of distortions November 14, 2008
6 out of 23 found this review helpful
Klein caters to her socialist audience with this work of astonishingly blatant distortions and falsehoods, knowing that it will sell to the true believers and that she'll get away with it. But don't look here for real scholarship. Her straw-man case against Friedman and free-markets it so blatantly distorted and fabricated that any gems of truth are lost in the mire.
Read the other one-star reviews for some details, and for a more thorough analysis read Johan Norberg's review in the October 2008 issue of Reason magazine, which shows how thoroughly Klein actually gets Friedman's position, and many facts about economics, exactly backward across the board. To accomplish that requires more than error, it indicates a deliberate attempt to deceive.
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