Pohl's 1950's book opens with an advertising agency's army forcing Outer Mongolia to accept billboards. His prediction was right on the nose, only, as Klein points out, the U.S. taxpayer paid for the effort not the corporations whom such wars benefited. The great thing about Iraq and post-Katrina Louisiana for that matter is that contractors paid for by taxpayer dollars were never subject to taxpayer oversight. Klein successfully reviews the more than half a century of tax payer subsidies of wars that benefited only the corporations. Do not be aroused by what you will read in this book; you can always tell other people that you were a "good" American and were never a member of the Nazi party.
Message to Klein: Surely an updated second edition is called for in which you point out that Bush and Cheney were never prosecuted for War Crimes and that Obama running on a "Get Out of Iraq" platform expanded the war effort into neighboring countries. Oh, and whereas the Taliban had banned the growth of poppies, Bush put heroin back on the streets of America.

Klein's book has been extensively reviewed and much quoted. Its well worth a read for anyone interested how the Right has captured public policy over the last few decades.

Klein demonstrates with many case studies how a highly organized resurgent Right, financed mostly by think-tanks supported by a committed coterie of very wealthy donors, have systematically prepared the agendas of global neo-liberal capitalism and used catastrophes, natural and man-made, to advance those agendas whenever and wherever the opportunities arise. From the murderous regime imposed by General Pinochet in 1970s Chile to the "clean slate" presented by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 and beyond, this highly organized intelligentsia of the Right and the politicians, policy-makers and moneyed interests who support them have been ready to move into devastated areas of the world at a moment's notice to create "test cases" for their vision of a world in which society-equals-the market. Klein argues convincingly that this approach is based on the advocates' understanding that their policies and ideas would never command a democratic consensus and must therefore be imposed, for the good of those who resist them and the world at large of course.

Klein's critique of this process adds an interesting and important dimension to understanding how power operates in contemporary global capitalism. While it is sometimes true to say that powerful interests and those who represent them depend on opacity, that is hardly an explanation of how policies genuinely harmful to working people actually gain traction and become public policy. This analysis documents with very specific proofs one important way that process operates in actually existing capitalism. It is essential reading for anyone interested in how a viable counter-strategy to it might be generated.

The Shock Doctrine is about exactly what it says, shock. It is about big business and government cashing in when countries experience turmoil such as war or natural disasters. Naomi Klein outlines major examples from the mid-twentieth century until now. If you are not current on world affairs, this book will catch you up. If you are current, you may want to read this book for the background of why current events are what and where they are. Shock Doctrine is not about relaxation and chocolate, it is about gaining knowledge about the history of our economic systems throughout the world.

In this chilling history of deregulated capitalism gone wild, Naomi Klein shows how Milton Friedman and his followers have taken advantage of chaos--caused by coups d'etat, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters--to transform tragedies into lucrative profit ventures.

The strategy? When the population is in a state of shock and trauma, quickly push through your desired economic policies: privitization, deregulation, and cuts in government services. If some brutality is required along the way, so be it.

While this topic has been covered by others, Klein offers a detailed chronicle of "shock treatment" doled out by Friedman and his friends from the Chicago School of Economics (with help from the World Bank and the IMF) over the last several decades, beginning in the wake of Pinochet's bloody coup in Chile, then moving on to other South American countries, followed by countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. In case after case, she offers a peek at the players behind the scenes and the heartbreaking human costs.

Klein gives nods to Keynesianism here and there (wish that would have been explored more), but her own orthodoxy does bleed through in parts, thus the deducted star. It's only a few pages before the end of the book that she briefly acknowledges, for instance, that pure socialism has also often been implemented and maintained using brual methods.

Still, it's a compelling book and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand more about the innerworkings of this ongoing phase of history.

While I've been meaning to pick up this book for a while, I finally got around to buying a copy of Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" this past December. I always find it interesting to read "current events"-type pieces a couple years after things have settled down (most "current" references were to 2006), but I found that little has actually settled down regarding a large portion of Klein's reporting. If anything, some of the "slippery slope" situations she points out may have actually been... uh... slipped on? Since 2001, the "disaster" industry (surveilance, "anti-terror," security, etc.) has boomed, making war and natural disaster something these industries need to survive, and the ties created by the Bush administration link the entire U.S. economy to the act of being perpetually at war.

Her detailed descriptions of some of the ulterior motives involved in U.S. economic policy (Rumsfeld's refusal to sell his stock in the company that produces Tamiflu while simultaneously using his power has Secretary of Defense recommending that the Defense Department buy up large quantities of the same product he stood to profit off of, Cheney's well-known inside deals that allowed him to procure no-bid contracts for companies he had an interest in such as Haliburton) were eye-opening, begging the question: Who are our leaders really looking out for? Our best interest? I don't think so.

She rails against the "free-market" economic theories of Milton Friedman and his Chicago-School approach to economics (basically, privatize as much as possible, eliminate public programs, cause an economic "shock," and allow the system to self-correct itself). She outlines in great deal the results yielded by past attempts to implement this type of policy (see: Chile, Russia under Boris Yeltsin, etc.), and the economic collapse each of these countries faced following these experiments. Despite this, it seems that some historians continue to be blinded by the idea of Chicago-School economics, heralding each of these a "success" in their own right: revisionist history at its best.

Garbage, this book is intellectually dishonest and misquotes one of the great thinkers of the 20th century. Read Milton, REALLY read him, and then read this book. The two worlds are opposites.

This book is odious. Are you familiar with the syllogism:

Hitler is evil
Hitler was a vegetarian
All vegetarians are evil?

Naomi Klein would sum up:

Pinochet was evil
Pinochet liked the Chicago School of Economics
The Chicago School is evil

Klein displays a gross ignorance about even basic economics. She sites a lot instances as accepted truths, but nowhere does she back up her claims with footnotes, concrete examples or statistics. She claims life was idyllic under Allende and Peron, but does not site stats to back it up.

What's even more specious and odious is to equate the Chicago School with an obscure, seriously demented "psychiatrist" who tortured his patients in Canada with financial backing from the CIA. It's obvious she has an agenda. Not a single Democratic President is mentioned in her political screed, even though LBJ and JFK were in power during some of these events (Indonesia 1965).

She praises "developmentalism", but never defines it and assumes the reader must agree with the concept.

A few parts that escape her:
� The foundation of a free market system is property rights, yet according to Klein Pinochet attacked peasants protesting for property rights;

� Another foundation is rule of law and respect for contracts, which were obviously not the case in Chile, Iraq or any of the countries she describes;

� Coercion and confiscation of public funds for government purposes is Socialism at its worst, It has nothing to do with the free market;

� How can any of her examples be the free market if the government is the only client?


She laments the use of Blackwater over UN Peacekeepers. In Srebnica, UN Peacekeepers disarmed Muslims, assuring them the UN would protect them from the Serbs. When the Serbs invaded, the UN walked away from the defenseless Muslims leaving the Serbs to massacre more than 5,000 innocent people. In Ruwanda, the UN knew about the genocide being planned, but walked away and let 800,000 people get slaughtered. The UN commissions Bulgaria to provide peacekeeping soldiers, and corrupt Bulgarian politicians pocket the money and send malnourished, poorly clothed Bulgarian prisoners to Africa as UN Peacekeepers. So, I think I'd prefer Blackwater for protection in most instances.

The suggestion that Bechtel build refugee camps has been brought up because the military is usually the first to meet fleeing refugees. Bechtel is also cost conscious. Many UN efforts to build refugee camps are fraught with corruption, theft and criminal exploitation of vulnerable people. In Yugoslavia, UN workers were arrested for financing prostitution rings.

In other words, Blackwater and Bechtel are not a conspiracy, there's a reason it's being suggested and discussed.

She mentions several times how price fixing helps the poor. In fact, she praises Nixon for fixing prices. However, she conveniently fails to mention that the result was Stagflation, that George Schultz was against it from the start and the resulting inflation eviscerated the savings of the middle class.

So much of her rhetoric is ephemeral attributes like "inner harmony" between Chicago school and torture. This was voiced by an opposition person who was eventually assassinated, so it must be true. There's a lot about feelings and juxtaposition with heart-rending examples of torture. It's all insinuation and guilt by association.

Hernando de Soto has done more for pointing out the need for titles and property rights to defend the poor.

As for her point that when ideology meets a clean slate it gets messy, I would put it differently. Lenin took Marx's ideology and basically said, we can't afford to wait and let it happen, we need to force it, we need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. In other words, the means are justified by the end. Arthur Koestler in DARKNESS AT NOON eloquently pointed out how morally bankrupt this approach is to any ideology, whether it's Capitalism or Communism. I don't condone what was done in the name of Capitalism in South America, but it was not Capitalism. The Comintern infiltrated labor unions and made them useless. In the 20th Century, an estimated 157 million people were murdered in the name of Communism, more than three times the estimated number of deaths in World War II. Pol Pot studied at the Sorbonne, but I don't blame the Academics of Sorbonne for the Khmer Rouge. Communist Idealogues also wanted to murder inconvenient people in the hopes of cultivating a new thinking on a clean-slate. 157 million people. It puts what happened in South America in better perspective I think.

As for aggressively moving ahead reform during emotional times, that is the nature of the political beast. After Columbine, gun control lobbyists moved aggressively to push through legislation when emotions were at their highest and anyone defending gun rights would have zero sympathy in any debate. FDR's efforts to pack the Supreme Court, Rex Tugwell's tutorial from Stalin on the command economy, were all pushed forward when Americans were reeling from the Depression. (Even so, the average unemployment rate during FDR's Presidency was 18%. In 1937, Tugwell lamented the abject failure of all his efforts to reform his way out of the Depression.) There is nothing new about pushing reform during unstable times because bureaucracies become entrenched, ossified and hostile to change.

In fact, a lot of the time disaster occurs beacause of these entrenched bureaucracies. Take a look at Greece today.

If you're looking for reasons to despise Capitalism and you are comfortable with specious reasoning, guilt by association and juxtaposition, faulty syllogisms, then this is the book for you.

Naomi Klein articulates how the global "free market" has taken advantage crises and shock for 30 years, ranging from places like Chile to now Iraq. Klein, in The Shock Doctrine, introduced the term "disaster capitalism." Klein takes this worldview from her experience covering such places as Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka in the aftermath of the tsunami, or New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Klein revisits old and new events in The Shock Doctrine writing about such events and places like the Pinochet coup and Chile, China and Poland, South Africa, Russia, Asia, Bolivia, New Orleans, Iraq, Israel, the UK, and the USA throughout the book. She shows how capitalism does not simply develop in the way that it pleases, but how it has to overcome the resistance capitalism itself has created. In all these places and after meeting all these people (whom she saw still trying to recover from the first catastrophe was hit by a second one) hit again with economic `shock treatment.'

At the core of the tragedy of this "shock doctrine" is people losing their livelihood, their homes, and their land to the rapacious demand of corporate development and similar opportunistic modalities. The Shock Doctrine is the story of the most hegemonic and destructive economic model of our time, Milton Friedman's unrestrained free market economic revolution. The promise of untrammeled practice of Friedmanesque (both Milton and Thomas) economics broken; Naomi Klein articulates how economic elites took advantage of times when people are too confused to react due to shock and were taken advantage of. Moreover, she explains how in times of severe violence economic policies are implemented in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq under the tutelage and constraints of IMF and World Bank. At the heart of "disaster capitalism" is the exploitation of catastrophes to move forward and implement radical privatization and to couple with that, such as the mother of all disaster capitalist moves -- the war in Iraq -- the privatization of the disaster response as well. Klein contends that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, "disaster capitalism complex" is now a thriving new economy, and is the violent zenith of the radical Chicago School Milton Friedman economic.

Buy this book! Buy extra ones for your friends! This is one of the most important books of the last 20 years. 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. 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.

To begin with a positive, I was fairly excited about this book. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. A wonderful example of this: "...U.S. 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. Barred competition, guaranteed profits? Do I really need to explain how that is NOT a free market? 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#Mx3UQNA20BNE9ZT

On 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. 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. 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. More often than not, it is a picture of a crisis or disaster occurring and capitalist influence following after the fact. This is where my final complaint comes in, and it is one of bias. 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. 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.

My final take is that this is a book that could have been much more. 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.

NURSE:- - - -Doctor M, the patient seems ill. What should we do?

DR. M:- - - - Bleeding is the only cure! Start the bleeding right away!

NURSE:- - - -Dr. the patient appears to be getting worse!

DR. M:- - - - Bleeding, we need more bleeding!

NURSE:- - - -Dr. the patient is critical, what should we do?

DR. M:- - - - Bleeding, we need more bleeding!

NURSE:- - - -Dr. the patient has died!

DR. M:- - - - If only we had done more bleeding he would have been cured!


Karl Marx and Milton Friedman would seem to be exact opposites. The truth is they both suffer from an identical delusion, that being, left on their own, people will operate in their long term self interest. The fact of the matter is that, history clearly demonstrates this fantasy to be utterly false.

The shortcomings of the socialist state hardly need elucidation but unfettered American capitalism is only slightly better. In my lifetime America has gone from the highest standard of living in the world to number 6. What is the solution? More tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Cut all social programs, repeal government regulations, and more spending for the military industrial complex. Look how well it has worked over the last 50 years.

Be it the workers utopia or the capitalist dream state, short term greed and megalomania always trumps long term benefit. Without regulation and over-site, provided by non invested parties, the system degenerates into a morass of carnage and self interest.

From LTCM to the Great Leap Forward there is not a single example of the Marx/Friedman agenda working in the long run. The truly frightening thing is there are still those in high places, on both sides, that see it as a matter of incomplete adoption and not failed ideology. In their minds success is a matter of degree. Just a little more bleeding and it will all magically get better!

NURSE:- - - - Doctor Miltie, the patient seems ill. What should we do?

DR. MILTIE: - Bleeding is the only cure! Start the bleeding right away!

NURSE:- - - - Dr. the patient appears to be getting worse!

DR. MILTIE: - Bleeding, we need more bleeding!

NURSE:- - - - Dr. the patient is critical, what should we do?

DR. MILTIE: - Bleeding, we need more bleeding!

NURSE:- - - - Dr. the patient has died!

DR. MILTIE: - If only we had done more bleeding he would have been cured!


In my lifetime America has gone from the highest standard of living in the world to number 6. What is the solution? More tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Cut all social programs and repeal government regulations. More spending for the military industrial complex. Look how well it has worked over the last 50 years. Just a little more bleeding and it will all magically get better!

Naomi Klein wants to shock. Shock sells. If shock is the means by which what she calls "Disaster Capitalism" achieves its aims, why shouldn't it be hers as well? The prime example is her 6 minutes horror film on YouTube advertising her book. Watch this and spare youself suffering through 500plus pages. Here's her recipe: Make up a thrilling headline, take a number of events in contempary history, add two dozen quotes taken out of context, a half-baked conspiracy theory, dress yourself to kill, give the left a much needed sex appeal, put it all into a blender and - voila! - you're an overnite sensation selling millions of books. In a profile on Naomi Klein in 'The New Yorker' her husband was quoted as saying "Naomi is a pattern recognizer. Some people feel that she's bent examples to fit the thesis." My feelings exactly.

Naomi Klein gives a wealth of information from a far-left point of view which is all too seldom heard in the discussion of solutions to economic problems. Whether or not one agrees with her analysis, it should be clear to everyone that enriching the debate with more ideas is a good thing. Sadly, this seems to be the opposite of the case, and the responses to her book from right-wingers and even some who don't think of themselves as right-wingers shows that at least one idea in the book is absolutely right -- the free market disciples now are treating any ideas that differ from theirs as a pollution rather than healthy dissent. Obviously, this tendency is dangerous, and should be opposed even by people who feel closer to Friedman than Chomsky ideologically.

I agree with other reviewers who found the metaphor strained. I suspect that it was just the easiest way to sell the book (in a time when marketing departments make all the major decisions about the eventual form of a book, even a book like this can be twisted into strange postures). It is really a sustained and cogent criticism of the Washington Consensus, the history of the Chicago Boys in dismantling economies around the world and clearing the way for riches to flow into the coffers of a few wealthy individuals.

When one looks dispassionately at the facts (without the legerdemain of right-wingers, which always claims that if a left-wing government has economic growth, it was all due to the previous right-wing government, while if a right-wing government has growth, it is of course due to the right-wing government's policies -- and so on) -- if one looks at statistics, then, it seems clear that these policies immediately impoverished millions and made the poverty of the already poor markedly more intolerable.

The only argument in favor of these policies that remains is that in the long run, they have made the world richer. The trouble with this claim is that there is no way of testing its validity. Industrialization goes forward under both left and right wing governments. The likelihood is that the world would be much richer after the passage of all these years, with their attendant technological innovation and just the sheer work of billions creating capital goods -- factories, infrastructure, even education that is passed down from parent to child regardless of whether schools close. I think few people would argue that a pure Communist system would have done better economically. By stamping out mixed economies wherever they arise (except in the developed world, which obviously had a head start) the possibility of comparison has been lost. But the fact that countries like America and Germany experienced their years of greatest wealth under their most mixed, Keynesian, economies, should demonstrate that there is nothing essential wrong with the Keynesian model. Whatever else it may be, it is very far from a disaster; unless we think the 60s in America were a time of economic catastrophe.

Also, it troubles me that, while the most die-hard Western Commie will ritually apologize for Stalin's crimes and insist that the form of Communism she espouses is very very different from Stalin's -- right-wingers have absolutely no tears to shed for the people slaughtered under right-wing dictatorships. It's very easy for them, it seems, to accept mass death of their opponents. This is the best evidence that the dogmatic period -- the bloody period -- of their philosophy is still ongoing.

The Shock Doctrine is a dangerous book for it may taint the minds of those who lack a basic knowledge of history and elementary economics. It may fool those who are na�ve, those who take every written word for fact. I fear for a generation of young adults who will grow up on completely misconstrued propaganda in the belief that what authors like Ms Klein write has anything to do with fact, reality and the way the world works. It is a shame, as the views, morals and values of the masses impact us all. That's why the shocking lies in this book need to be exposed for what they are.

One of the accolades for the book on its back cover reads "If you only read one non-fiction book this year, make it this one". This scares me, and should be of concern to all; but it probably also summarizes who the author had in mind when writing this book. I am not surprised, as anyone not fitting this group should find Ms Klein's work a glaring and complete delusion to truth, history and economics.

This is a shockingly wrong book; it is wrong on so many levels, not just the complete mischaracterisation of history and facts. But those errors are straightforward to refute, and many commentators have pointed those out. Of a deeper concern for the welfare of humanity are Ms Klein's ideological obfuscations. What Ms Klein's work mounts to, is a disguised praise for Communism, for what else can her passages imply? She seems to be in favour of a "right to work, to decent housing"; she seems to support land re-distribution and debt forgiveness. What about property rights Ms Klein? What about the fact that resources are finite and men have to compete for those resources? That is the reality we face; while it appears, Ms Klein is striving for ideological utopia, which by the way has been tried, tested and failed (I know as I come from a country that tried; involuntarily I might add). If Ms Klein is a disguised supporter of Communism as it appears, it is totally baffling that she uses quotes from George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" to illustrate the ills of free markets. How illogical. Those quotes warn about the dangers of Communism and tyranny, not free markets. It makes me wonder if Ms Klein wrote this book with an understanding of socio-economics and with a careful intention to manipulate facts, or if she does not herself understand what she is writing. I doubt the second possibility, but am truly surprised by the insertion of such ill suited quotes.

Ms Klein: military dictatorships are not libertarian free market economies. They are fascist states. Of course they use coercion, torture and abuse. That's how fascist states are run. Don't confuse them for what Mr Friedman stood for. Torture is not a "silent partner" of free markets. It is a tool of fascist dictators.

The most far fetched, outrageous, illogical and simply incomprehensible arguments of Ms Klein involve her extension of the word "shock" as applied to torture, to economic "shock therapy". Just because the same word is present in the two phrases, does not mean that they mean the same thing. Have those praising The Shock Doctrine realised that fact? The two "shocks" which she uses interchangeably, are anything but the same thing. The behaviour of agonising pain applied to defenceless individuals is abhorable. That does not mean that the adaptation of individuals to a free market economy has anything remotely to do with it. I can assure you, that most real proponents of free markets do not take pleasure in ripping out other men's fingernails, or applying electric shocks to someone's body. Don't use universally tarnished and denounced examples of behaviour to blame a philosophy that has been developing for two centuries and has marked the greatest progress of human civilization.

Why does Ms Klein not move to North Korea or Venezuela? I am sure she would feel right at home there, in her little socialist paradise.

In of her best books, Naomi Klein elaborates a theory about neo-liberalism and how governments implement this economic policies by taking advantage of disasters or situations. The Shock Doctrine explains a lot of things that happen around us everyday. For all political scientists, theorists, college students or just for a great historical-political-economical read, this is your book.

Although Ms. Klein's book is very thorough and very good as far as it goes, it's theoretical background seems to be limited to economics and thus fails to put the policies from the 1970's to the present in the context of long term imperialism and militarism. The invasions of Mexico, Phillipines, and various countries in Latin America all happened before the Chicago School existed.

This is what I consider to be one of the most important books on how the U.S. has manipulated foreign governments over the past three decades. Naomi Klein is an amazing journalist. Her research is thorough, her analysis impeccable. I was either ignorant most of my life or these events were just not reported with any degree of thoroughness.

The central ogre in all of our mayhem has been Milton Friedman and his Chicago School of Economics. The Chicago Boys started with Pinochet taking over Chili in the early 70s. The central theme has been to privatize all state-owned institutions (and everything else they could grab) and sell them to (largely U.S.) companies at pennies on the dollar. In the process, it required laying off sometimes hundreds of thousands of locals, plunging the respective country into sever poverty (The Shock Doctrine), disappearing and torturing dissidents (the other shock doctrine), even utilizing genocide. This was done under the cloak of bringing democracy to the country, but actually was instituted to bring heavy handed capitalism.

From Chili, we moved to the "Southern Cone", which included Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil. Then, taking the hint, Margaret Thatcher used the same principals to create and win a war in the Falklands, which was successful in getting her re-elected despite her plunging support in Britain. Believe it or not, the break-up of the USSR was considered a similar "opportunity", and Gorbachov was kicked out, Yeltsin let in (easily manipulated). The only difference in Russia was that they "de-socialized" the country by selling to rich Russians instead of to U.S. and other ultra-national countries. Yet, Chicago Boys economists still got paid big bucks to lead the economic revolution in Russia, just they had in the other countries.

We heard that we were going to Iraq because of WMD. Then it was about freedom. Rumors were that it was about oil. What it really was encompassed the same greed-inspired attempt to sell off all the state-owned operations to private companies - Halliburton, Bechtel and others at the top of the list. Locals were not employed in their own operations, but instead, foreigners were brought in as employees, while locals were left impoverished. The only problem with Iraq was that the people responded with unanticipated gusto to thwart Bremer's attempts to privatize (under guidance of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld). So, major players pulled out after earning billions in wasted efforts to bring back infrastructure to the country. Interestingly, all these "contractors" were paid on a cost plus basis, guaranteeing them profit on their work with no downside for failure.

I sincerely recommend you get this book. It's dense reading, but you can't go more than a couple of pages without voicing profanities. I can't help but keep a highlighter handy.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I got it from the library, twice, then bought it from Amazon. The book seems kind of heavy for its size. Maybe because it is packed with so much interesting information.

This book is at the same time very scary and very exciting. The book starts out slowly talking about things like electric shock therapy experiments done decades ago and you wonder what this has to do with the goal of the book to talk about economic issues. However, by the end of the book, the theme of shock therapy is well-cultivated. In any case, this book represents an ambitious project. It basically attempts to view the period from the late 1960s through the present from the perspective of what it calls Chicago School Capitalism. The author traces worldwide attempts to install a free-wheeling laissez faire type capitalism via shocks of one kind or another. She details many kinds of shocks ranging from military coups featuring brutal repression to man-made or natural disasters. The basic crux of the story is that in one country after another, a shock to citizens was utilized to bring a massive wave of privatization, social spending cuts and deregulation. This policy was advocated by the famous almost god-like economist Milton Friedman, but rather than praise the strategy, the author points out how in instance after instance this led to severe economic poverty for large sectors of the population and many other negative effects. She details how many international agencies and governments were in on the process from the US government to the IMF and World Bank. Just when the reader becomes severely depressed over the bleak picture, she ends the book with a hopeful section pointing out how many areas have managed to turn this around into a new third way that offers real hope and significant protection from future shocks.

The thing I liked best about this book is that it offers a coherent narrative that makes sense of all the things I have seen on the news in my life, which roughly covers the same time period as this book. Obviously, real life isn't so neat and clean as to perfectly fit a well-constructed 600 page synopsis of 40 years of world history, but this is a good attempt to make sense out of something that can seem confusing. For me there is a real disconnect, in many cases, between the high-minded rhetoric of free markets and unfettered capitalism and the results we see in the real world. I think everyone suspects that things don't work out as neatly as promised. We can see hints of trouble all around even though there is a constant veneer of success held up in the media when talking about the places where these shock-based free-market experiments took place. This book presents a viewpoint that makes a lot of these things appear more coherent. For example, if you view Iraq as a free-market experiment and not as a project in democracy and security, what happened there makes more sense.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is genuinely concerned about the world economy and the direction that society is taking. It's probably not a book for those who want to view the world in polar terms and imagine that things like capitalism and socialism are opposite extremes that share no middle ground. For me the salient question is this. Will the world manage, like some of the examples at the end of the book, to turn away from this type of shock-based free market exploitation, or will new ways of implementing it ruin the hope for billions of average people around the world?

If you must read this as I unfortunately did (audio download), please, please, read some Friedman too, or at the very least a synopsis of his works and ideas. He and his ideas are most grossly misrepresented by Klein. Yes, Friedman consulted for Pinochet's economic ministers briefly and gave them some ideas on how to liberalize markets (to try to fight the hyperinflation started by Pinochet), but he was not in any way complicit with Pinochet's repressive techniques! On the contrary, Friedman saw the implementation in Chile of his recommendations as a means for undermining Pinochet's tyrannical regime! Klein's inference that Friedman's ideas and Pinochet's despotic actions and policies in Chile were even remotely compatible or synthesized in parallel are laughable, and some simple fact-checking and a look into the chronology of events will quickly show the sloppy and shameful liberties she has taken.

I have given 3 stars only because I completely agree with the concept that people and parties take advantage of crises (in the name of self interest, or to further the greater good, or for a whole spectrum of reasons in between). Obviously crises present wonderful opportunities to fix broken systems in the hope of preventing such future crises. Witness the probable and imminent worldwide reforms to financial systems in response to last autumn's financial crisis. But to suggest that greedy corporatists are slowly changing the world in their favor, one crisis at a time, insults even one's most basic abilities to observe and analyze. The economy and it's infinite mechanisms and machinations are undergoing a great restructuring and reordering. Yes, there will certainly be some who take an immoral advantage of this situation, and unfortunately this will also include tendencies to try to increase government and bureaucratic control over the economy, but the net result will be an overall moral improvement over the previous shortcomings.

This book should be read by everyone in this country in order to understand how corporate America has taken over, and will keep doing so until there will be no middle class. There will only be the very, very rich...who will keep getting richer, and the peons, who will be working for them. America, as we once knew it will be gone unless and until we the people do something, and not sit quietly with our eyes closed, and our houses being forclosed.

Trust me, after reading this book, your eyes will be open. It is scary, but what happened to so many countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe, not only can happen, but is happening here.

Again, I say...everyone should read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, even though as John Le Carre, the writer of spy novels said about this book..."it's scary as hell." But it is so important.

An excellently written indictment of the forces of Chicago School laissez-faire capitalism and the incredible misery it causes in the pursuit of profit and power. It could probably be easily denounced as an ultra left-wing diatribe were it not so impeccably researched and masterfully woven. The dots are undeniably connected between disaster, whether natural or man-made, and the subsequent forced economic liberalization imposed by large corporations, their governments and the IMF and World Bank. These liberalizations lead to the selling off of a country's natural resources, the privatization of government industries and the removal of the people from the entire transaction, leading to general impoverishment and ever widening gaps between rich and poor. Meanwhile the ruling powers of these countries enrich themselves and even further enrich foreign multinational corporations. These changes are imposed with an iron fist of repression, terror and murder of those with the temerity stand against these outrages.

The book illustrates that these patterns have been played out again and again since the 1970's when Friedmanite neoliberal economic theory got it's first test cases in Latin America, beginning with Chile and its dictator Augusto Pinochet. Against shock of a military coup the nation's economy was radically liberalized, immediately impoverishing millions of its citizens and those who asked for a say in the country's future were disappeared, tortured and murdered. This was replayed again and again through Latin America, Russia and several other countries up until the present.

The Shock Doctrine reveals the sordid details of this radical approach to capitalism, the motivations of its adherents, its methods and terrible results. This is a must read book for anyone concerned about the current state of the world and how it got there. The fortunes of any country and the world at large is inextricably tied to economic forces and this book shows how the dark side of capitalism can wreak untold havoc on countries and people, impoverishing the masses while the rich grow even richer. I give it the highest recommendation.

I started to read The Shock Doctrine in a loaned copy of the book recommended by my son-in-law. After I finished the first two chapters, I realized that I had to make this book a permanent addition to my reference library. Naomi Klein excels in explaining the true ideology and principles in which Milton Friedman based his free-market economic revolution and his terrifying experiments and infamous ways that he and his followers employ and still try to impose in disseminating his economic policies. This is a great book that explains why in many countries across the world exists an antagonism toward the American influence in their internal affairs.

There are many good or even great books that cover the neoliberal period from moderately left-wing perspectives, such as those by Andrew Glyn, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Pollin, Alice Amsden, and Ha-Joon Chang among others. Is this one of such books? No.

The only good aspects of this book are some interesting historical facts about the dark side of the American foreign policy (e.g. coups in Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973) and useful descriptions of neoliberal reforms. Unfortunately, it all turns into a massive hysterical rant as bad as those of Milton Friedman.

Klein's research is often very sloppy. According to her, "Austrians" are a grouping within the Chicago School, she does not differentiate between Frank Knight's first Chicago School and Friedman's second Chicago School, and keeps perpetuating the myth that Adam Smith was a proto-Friedmanite. Poor Dani Rodrik, a progressive in the neoclassical mainstream and a critic of the Washington Consensus, is slandered as some devious rogue of the "neoliberal tribe". Neoliberals and neoconservatives are supposedly the same thing. These are just details, of course, but her reasoning is even worse. I almost put the book down for good when I reached the part where Thatcher succeeds in crushing unions solely because of a manufactured war. Whatever happened to union militancy which brought down Callaghan's government and discredited Labour and moderate "One Nation Tories"?

I would not be so mad if I actually opposed a more generous social safety net, universal healthcare, or stronger financial regulation. In that case I would be glad that left-wing "intellectuals" are such easy targets. But as it is, I can only recommend people with center-left sympathies to ignore this and pick up some book by one of the aforementioned authors. Glyn's "Capitalism Unleashed" and Pollin's "Contours of Descent" are great sources on the economic performance of the neoliberal period. Chang's "Bad Samaritans" and Amsden's "Escape from Empire" cover developmentalism well. Stigliz is great, plain and simple. Do not waste your time with Klein.

Naomi Campbell's book is much more than I ever could have expected. While not only a radical perspective compared to most americans economic views, the book provides a very interesting and little known history to light. The book examines often the US and the role of multinational corporations and its role in toppling and inserting brutal free markets into countries in South America and how similar things have happened theoughout the world all through the last half of the twentieth century.

This book changed my life in many ways. While not only giving me much better knowledge about free market problems, the book made me realize that freedom is great but making sure your neighbors and community are taken care of should be just as strong and important values and that a certain american ideology doesnt allow for that.

I had not expected Klein's book to be this good. We learn a lot here about how the Chicago School of Economics (as pioneered by Milton Friedman) has been responsible for some of the most atrocious political crimes of the last 4 decades. Crimes that were committed not only against the body politic of developing nations but also the bodies of human beings tortured under dictatorships.

Everyone who doubts that America has blood on its hands for its interference in world affairs (e.g. Chile, Iran, Russia, Argentina) needs to open their eyes. Democracy and Free Markets do not go hand-in-hand as Bush and the Neo-Cons would have you believe, but quite the opposite: wherever Chicago economists have sought to imopose their brand of capitalism it has been enforced with blood.

"Is neoliberalism an inherently violent ideology, and is there something about its goals that demands this cycle of brutal political cleansing, followed by human rights cleanup operations?" -- Naomi Klein

In "The Shock Doctrine" Naomi Klein documents the brief history of Neoliberalism. Throughout the plethora of case studies it becomes obvious that neoliberal policy is extremely unpopular among the masses. In order to implement radically free markets, free trade, and massive privatization authoritarian control is necessary. Authoritarianism has come in the form of outright right-wing dictatorships and popularly elected officials that disregard democracy as soon as their elected. Behind this authoritarian movement has been Milton Friedman and his disciples.

What makes Klein argument unique is her emphasis on 'shock treatment'. A three pronged approach has been used by governments across the globe. First, a physical shock occurs (whether it be a coup, economic meltdown, or natural disaster). Second, a political shock occurs (in the form of radical policy). Third, a crackdown occurs to make any remaining political resistance impotent.

When the shocks are in progress the West blames the democratic resistance as impeding progress. The perpetrators of neoliberalism, like Friedman and Jeffery Sachs, distance themselves from the violence they have helped promote. After the shocks the architects of neoliberalism claim that history has vindicated their theory. Yet in reality everywhere they go drastic increases in unemployment, poverty and inequality follow.

Klein argues for a 'third-way'. Essentially what she outlines is for a mixed economy that has a heavy hand in stabilizing employment and output with a large welfare state. In other words, 'Twenty-First Century Socialism'. She sees South American countries, like Brazil and Bolivia, leading the way towards a more democratic world.

Nevertheless, her work is far from perfect. 'The Shock Doctrine' avoids economic theory whenever possible. This is somewhat understandable because it would alienate much of her potential audience. But it also leads her to oversimplify and lump together very different ideas. For example, she muddles Keynesianism. She claims that it inspired FDR's New Deal (which was actually pre-Keynesian). Then she goes on to use Keynesianism as synonymous with 'import-substitution'. She continually dances around the role expectations play in economics (the entire theoretical reason for shock policies). If she just spent several pages explaining the theory of expectations it would have been much clearer to the audience why shock therapy appears justified but is actually flawed. Finally, her constant comparisons between psychological shock and economic shock border on sensationalism. This may make the book a more compelling read for the uninformed but it tends to distract from her otherwise serious thesis.

No other work of recent history or study of "globalization" has managed to make so many major world events fit together so coherently. The synthesis of research is truly astonishing. Yes, the thesis is sweeping and there are oversimplifications, but this work truly does reveal a master narrative of contemporary history that will change the way you understand current events.

The fact that capitalism has taken a drubbing recently is not without its ironies. Any rational, informed person knows that the big failures in our system - the mortgage market and health care - are both the direct result of government involvement. We also know that the people arguing the loudest that the solution is more government involvement are the people who most benefited from that failure.

Thus, it almost goes without saying that anti-capitalism requires one to be ideologically blinkered and serially dishonest. Yet Naomi Klein's new 'bible' of anti-capitalism still manages to surprise in its level of sheer dishonesty and propagandist tactics.

There are so many flaws with Klein's thesis that one hardly knows where to begin: her staggeringly idiotic assertions about the motives of the Chinese protesters at Tianmen Square; her cherry-picking of examples from the largest, and most benign, free-market expansion and corresponding elevation of global living status in history; her complete misrepresentation of the beliefs of Milton Friedman, to the point of claiming his policies justified the Iraq invasion when Friedman was explicitly against the invasion (something she conveniently leaves out of her book); her idiotic theories that Katrina was welcomed as an opening for greater subjugation of the people to the horrors of capitalism; et cetera.

Johan Norberg of Reason Magazine sums up the situation perfectly while eviscerating her childish thesis:

"To make her case, Klein exaggerates the market reforms in question, often ignoring central events and rewriting chronologies. She confuses libertarianism with the quite different concepts of corporatism and neoconservatism. And she subjects Milton Friedman to one of the most malevolent distortions of a thinker's ideas in recent history."

But leaving aside the fact that her entire theory is nonsense, there is still her hypocrisy to consider. Here's a recent comment from Naomi Klein:

"Do we want to save the pre-crisis system, get it back to where it was last September? Or do we want to use this crisis, and the electoral mandate for change delivered by the last election, to radically transform that system? We need to get clear on our answer now because we haven't had the potent combination of a serious crisis and a clear progressive democratic mandate for change since the 1930s. We use this opportunity or we lose it."

This is, of course, the modus operandi of the leftist: claim that something is happening to distract and frighten people so you can then do that exact thing, e.g.: claim the 'free market' is to blame for government bungling and protectionism to introduce more government bungling and protectionism. As such, Klein popularizes the myth of 'disaster capitalism', ignoring fact and reason, specifically to enable the reality of disaster progressivism.

And judging by the rave reviews this utterly dishonest and disingenuous waste of paper received, that sinister method continues to work.

History has always been distorted by the anti-capitalists, or so-called communists and leftists. There are serious mistakes regarding the brazilian historical facts, so make sure you'll read a good historic book covering the years prior to the military coup and the military dictatorship. The communist groups acting in Brazil were well trained for war and they may have killed far more innocent people and soldiers than the military did. The present success of brazilian economy was the result of neoliberal ideas implemented by past administrations. The current government lead by the workers party, has legalized corruption, has conspired to shut down democratic institutions and has fought free press. This is the anti-liberal government in action. The nation's president has "miraculously" become an extremely wealthy men, as well as his associates. The legacy of this leftist administration has mined all of our chances to compete in the future. Similar to what happened during the military dictatorship, where all excessive public spending and corruption ended the miracle of 13% year growth. If there has been a coup, this has been conducted by the lefts, that distort history on their behalf and that fight for a form of government that has been shown to privilege a few ones and maintained vast populations in poverty. They have never fought for democracy!

This book is well written and well researched. It is an easy read. It will change the way you'll look at the world...but be ready for a shock. I highly recommend this book.

I read this book after strong recommendations by academic colleagues teaching our International Business degree programme. While I found it fascinating, the use of hyperbole and an occasional lack of rigour places this book squarely in the realms of a polemic rather than a credible critical or political analysis. As a polemic, it pushes all the right buttons and provides a wealth of sources to support the many claims that are made.

One key strength of the book is the international coverage, and the depth of the discussions from all parts of the world. Snippets from personal visits and interviews lend a level of drama and realism, but the kind of rigour expected in academic studies is not present in this work. If I were judging this book wholly on readability and contribution to contemporary debates, it would surely get five-stars. It is a long overdue examination of the risible claim that US-style democracy is being spread peacefully around the world. The central thesis, ably articulated, is that free-markets have had anti-democratic impacts in every state where they have been deployed. Klein's argument is at its most powerful in discussions of Poland, Russia and South Africa. In Poland, she describes the mass support for restructuring state industries as worker cooperatives, only to be ignored by overseas "aid" agencies determined to force through privitisation plans (halted and partially reversed after elections swept the Solidarity movement leadership from power and reintroduced some measure of democracy). In Russia, she sets out how the will of elected representatives was - quite literally - shot to pieces when the military enforced the suspension of parliament. This left behind a Yeltsin dictatorship advised by US free-marketeers in all aspects of economic policy, resulting in the Russian oligarchs and a mafia-controlled business sector. In South Africa, Klein describes how joining international financial institutions made it impossible for politicians to deliver their promises for land reform and an economy based on cooperative enterprise. The blatant opportunism of the IMF and World Bank, and their complicity working with defenders of aparteid, is described in detail and fully exposed. The naivity of South Africa's newly elected negotiators is shocking, tragic and gripping in equal measure, contributing to the most unjust international "aid" of the century.

As Klein convincingly argues, the democratic will of elected representatives was crushed in each of these (and other) countries to pursue an anti-democratic ideology based on a global free-market. She describes the unholy trinity of the IMF, World Bank and US corporations who collaborated in the removal or subversion of democratic politics around the global. As such, the book provides a new level of insight into the coordination between various international authorities supporting mass-exploitation directly opposed to democratic rule and makes a worthwhile contribution of lasting value. Particularly heartening is the final chapter ("Shock Wears Off") which indicates the collapsing influence of the IMF, World Bank and USA amongst South American countries. Around the world institutions are being developed to end the era of lassez-faire economics.

So where does the book fall down? As other authors have pointed out, there is a clear political bias to the writing that will please some and attract the condemnation from others. This, for me, was not the biggest flaw. Rather, it was the carelessness of some claims that retrospectively fits 'facts' to theory, rather than developing theory from 'facts'. Secondly, there is no full consideration of the debates surrounding the impact 9/11. The author, incredibly bold in setting out the influence of US corporates and the US government outside the USA, is much more inhibited about developments within the USA itself. Having set out that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld effectively declared "war" on the Pentagon (with the goal of ending US-style "central planning"), it is staggering that the author ignores both international debate and USA court cases that claim that 9/11 was itself part of the very 'shock therapy' that is central to the book's thesis. Perhaps this was a step too far for the publisher? Lastly, the loose use of important words and concepts by the author weakens its intellectual stature. For example, 'postmodern' management is linked to Friedman's free-market ideology: this is a profound misreading of the political assumptions of 'postmodernism', as well as the way postmodernism is affecting the study and practice of management.

These gripes aside, I unreservedly recommmend this book. An updated edition that considers the 2008 / 2009 banking collapse in light of the book's central thesis would surely be another best seller. Are we witnessing the boldest attempt yet at Shock Therapy, or - as John Gray argues - the final nail in the coffin of global laissez-faire?

I, for one, would be interested in this author's view.

Rory Ridley-Duff (Dr)
Senior Lecturer
Sheffield Hallam University

I read this book as a liberal with an anti-corporate mentality. I read this book hoping I could gather specific examples of how big companies shape the world, and this book was a great commentary of several different neo-liberal revolutions across the world in the past 50 years.

It talks about the years of oppression South America faced under brutal right wing dictators influenced by American economists, The role of the IMF and the World Bank in pressuring countries to open their markets to foreign multinationals, and U.S policy under Bush which involved selling assets to companies in the name of counter-terrorism. Klein's thesis is basically that free markets do not always indicate free people. It also ends in a positive note commenting on some countries recovery after years of oppression.

This book gets criticized for misrepresenting Milton Friedman's views and not differentiating between a genuinely Free Market and a corporatist state. In reality, however, Milton Friedman played a huge role in the advancement of corporate states (ie sending advisers to Pinochet and still praising him despite human rights violations) and few right wing governments and institutions of today promote a capitalism where everyone is free to choose. The capitalism we know today is government teaming up with big companies to help corporations grow. This book is an excellent critique of this system and commentary on it's negative effect on the people of the world.

This book has changed my perspective on economics and the ideas of free moarkets. Great book and a must read.

The evils Klein describes are those of fascism, and statism in general. It is in statism that the government is allowed to take someone's property by force. Pinochet and Allende were both statists, and the claim that Allende gave more back to the people, even if true, does not erase the fact that his government could only give back by first taking from the people. Like fascism, other variants of statism such as communism, socialism, despotism and feudalism are all based on the premise that in varying degrees, you do not own yourself, the State does. Or the King. Or the Country. Or the Majority. Or the Party. Or the People.

Capitalism by contrast is based on individual property, and no one is given the right to take away anything from you, or force you to do anything. You are free to trade with anyone on terms you both agree to. You are free to purchase as much contract insurance and law enforcement as you wish, from companies competing for your business. The potential problem of competing law enforcement companies using violence against one another rather than reaching a more profitable agreement, or the other potential problem of these companies joining to form a state, i.e. an entity with a monopoly on violence within a certain geographical area, are to be contrasted with the actual evils perpetrated by past and existing states, such as those Klein mentions.

Replace the word capitalism by fascism everywhere in the book and it will be a lot less wrong. If capitalism does not exist on earth now, it is mostly because of people like Klein, who should know better than to misrepresent it. Capitalism is in Klein's self-interest too, although she would have to switch to a more productive line of work than propagating lies. For a good introduction to statism vs capitalism, see Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

Fifty years ago, Eisenhower warned his public about the Military Industrial Complex. Flash forward to 2007, Naomi Klein warns her public about the morphing of that sector into the Disaster Capitalism Complex, a shapeless movement informed by free market idealogs and their direct government connections.

The painstakingly assembled book tries to coherently answer that dodgiest of questions, "Why is the west so hated around the world?" Trying her best to connect the dots through recently unsealed public documents, miles of quotations by relevant public and private figures, interviews of credible witnesses and documentation supported by forty pages of footnotes, Klein comes the closest I've read to explaining how the machinations of capitalism have wrought destruction on tiny nations of which some folks may never have heard.

Citing examples ripped from yesterday and today's headlines, from Pinochet's Chile to Hurricane Katrina, Klein draws a line between the casual Wall Street investor and the planned disaster strategist. It's a tall order to peel back the layers of history to reveal the role of psychological warfare techniques on the stock market, but in the end, the book makes twisted sense. History is full of commentators who studied the relationships between war and economic policy; here the commentary is about the rise of an economy that thrives on natural and man-made misery and investor determination to encourage its survival.

Even though opinion on this view of economic history may provoke partisan agendas, "The Shock Doctrine" makes for essential reading, even if Klein admits the lines drawn from some accusations are inconclusive. The reader may find her rhetoric arrogantly dismissive, but the fact is, her discoveries made her passionately critical of the current political headwinds. She also is unapologetic over her family's socialist tendencies, and that may be enough for some readers to cry foul. It's important to start this book without preconceptions and let it work on your personal biases because, in the end, one can judge the book an opinion piece. At the very least, Klein's arguments will slam your notion of 20th century history on its ear.

I caught up with Klein's no logo last year (somewhat late considering it was out in about 2000 and seemed to be read everywhere I went at the time). No Logo was terrific, but stunningly I think Klein has outdone herself with this one, it's a masterpiece.

There is so much to say about this book, that it could take a month to compose and do it justice. I think that !Edwin C. Pauzer review 'shockingly powerful' pretty much says it all (it's a 5 star review).

This is what I have to add.
I think the brilliance of Klein's book boils down to this. It essentially creates an over-arching narrative and pattern over the last 35 years of politicking and foreign and domestic policy by the US (mainly) and other nations allied to the US in how an orthodoxy called neo-liberal economics that originated with the Austrian economist von Hayek and his US counterpart Friedman was imposed on country after country using the most underhand and society traumatising events. Coups, military takeovers, IMF/world bank shock therapy demands and finally wholescale foreign wars.
This economic model was forced on the countries usually with the help of insiders looking to benefit from the coming deregulation and wholescale wealth transfers and was designed to replace the developmental models of economics that took root in many third world nations in the 1950s and 1960s.

As you read all 466 pages of the paperback edition, you feel as if you have woven a coherent thread through many key events of the post WWII period of world history. The book is exceptionally timely as we are now witnessing the global meltdown of neo-liberal economics. For such a wrenching and complicated story, it's a surprisingly easy read and is in fact beautifully written.

This is a deeply important and informative book, I don't think you can truly understand how the world works, or what has been done to hundreds of millions of people worldwide in our name in the last 35 years, without taking the time to treat yourself to this superb effort by Naomi Klein.

This book is more of a political mouthpiece than something to be taken seriously. Klein's claims in the book are so outrageous that I think even the most staunch liberal would have a hard time believing it. The most "shocking" thing in her book is when she goes on to blame Milton Friedman for corporatism, and various problems within the global economy, while ignoring anything that Friedman himself has actually said, or that he was totally against the Iraqi war.

Let's review some facts, which I think Mrs. Klein seems to have left from her book. Who said this great quote that seems to agree with the author about war: "War is a friend of the state.... In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do."...why it was Milton Friedman, on the Iraqi war, warning of the government imperialism.

How about this one? "Business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.... Every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but when it comes to himself that's a different." That was Milton Friedman again...

I'm surprised the author didn't propose bringing back the draft, which Friedman was opposed to, or better yet say he was for the draft. This book is a shock doctrine indeed, in that it's a shock people would actually believe the garbage spewing from Naomi Klein's finger tips.

If you are serious about economics, don't bother to read this book, it's more of a comedic piece on political bias than an ode to any sort of economic reasoning.

Without getting into too many details, this is made of much blabber that sums up to poor and baseless arguments. The author consistently fails to understand the essence of the parties for which she argues, thus removing any premise or merit from her theories before even making her argument.
This is narrow mindedness dressed up as a broad sophisticated outlook on the organizations running our world.

If you are a shallow person who hope to gain an effortless broad perspective and a smart suit by reading the works of a writer that is full of agendas and does poor research and understanding of facts; look no further. Otherwise, don't waste your time - Freakonomics would give you better perspective than this garbage. I kid you not.

I have always been a fan of Klein's work for the Nation, and by reading "The Shock Doctrine," I have concluded that Klein should be considered the leading economic authority of the late 20th and early 21st century. "The Shock Doctrine" exposes the true nature of capitalism: a "policy that breeds poverty and crime."

What is the Shock Doctrine?
According to Klein, the doctrine refers to the notion that governments (mostly the U.S. but also other developed nations) use natural disasters, wars, and coups that shock people, to pass and permanently instill economic reforms that widely disrupt the nation's economy.

What economic reforms are implemented?
The basic reforms that are passed, by the IMF/World Bank/U.S. Treasury, during the time of shock are referred to as policies stemming from the Chicago School of Economics (Reaganomics) made famous by Milton Friedman. This is the belief that if the market is left alone without government intervention, the precise number of products with exactly the right prices would be produced by precisely the correct number of workers paid by exactly the right amount of wages.

What Klein proves is this is absolutely absurd. The Structural Adjustment Programs (elimination of government subsidies, elimination of price controls, massive privatization of all publicly owned goods, etc.) forced on a nation receiving a loan from the IMF actually cause the nation's economy to spiral downwards, which include a huge increase in unemployment, a drastic reduction of real wages, skyrocketing inflation, crackdown on dissidents, etc.

Klein shows this has occurred in Chile under Pinochet, Bolivia, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Russia, Poland, China, South Africa and New Orleans. Klein also writes of how once the Iraq war was begun, contracts were provided to top level government officials in order for their companies to reap massive profits. (Ex: Dick Cheney-Halliburton; Donald Rumsfeld-Pharmaceutical companies with patents on the Avain Flu vaccine, AIDS medicine, NutraSweet.)

In all, the book is amazing. Klein's incredible primary sources, which include an interview with Jeffrey Sachs and first hand accounts in Iraq and South Africa provide much authenticity and reliability to the book. The book is much more than what I have previously stated in paragraphs above. The Shock Doctrine truly exposes the harshness and brutality of disaster capitalism.

While I appreciate Naomi Klein's thorough authorship of this very interesting topic, I feel as if the book repeats the same basic issue repeatedly to drive home a point that the reader becomes fairly convinced of by the middle of the book. Some of the case studies are especially interesting, such as Chile, Russia, and Iraq, but I almost felt as if some of the other examples were superfluous for proving the main point of the book - that crisis of many kinds can be taken advantage of to push through extremely unpopular free market reforms that harm the populace of the country that it is imposed upon. Additionally, I felt that Ms. Klein too often made the tenuous link between actual shock torture and the "shock doctrine" of economics to drive a point home. I realize why it is included, but to me it seems to serve as almost a cheap, well, shock tactic. All in all, however, the book supports its hypothesis with ease and is very well written. I would suggest it to anyone.

Naomi Klien's book is a historical account of meddling as an art form.
She describes the monied interests' alignment with power for the past forty or so years.
What you learn is that we all lie to ourselves and others but behind our lies is often naked greed and self-interest.
Anyone who ignores this book ignores America's past and fails to learn some of the most important lessons of failed foreign policy.

President Obama is also using the "shock doctrine" to pass a socialist agenda that would be unthinkable in this country during most times.

Naomi Klein capitalizes on fear and anti-Bush rhetoric.

I was not prepared to consider the ties and links forming a huge web of fiscal control over every facet of life including the formation of governments, of which are enemies of people and freedom.

The age in which we are living does not reflect the ideals on which this country was formed. I am and continue to be completely shocked, my world seems shattered.

I feel like a fool living in a bubble. blind and ignorant after reading this book.

Dennis Hanson

Unfortunately with Amazon you have to have a single star for a rating, but this should be void of a star. After reading this book from our public library system, this book makes false assertions as to Milton Friedman and distorts the facts of political events, as well as economic facts. The author is shill for unions, statists, and global governance. Milton Friedman was actually true liberal and progressive thinker, and the author of this book is a hypocrite (this book should be free and the environmental cost would be too great). One should spend more productive use with their time then to read this drivel. Watch the Friedman debates Klein on YouTube and read and research the facts. The fact is this, only a free market and free society can a nation rise to greatness.

For people not familiar with the Chicago School's thesis, the book is a shock in itself. This is an extraordinary work of research and anaysis. Full of details, gives a complete picture of what it is happening in the economic and political sphere. The financial crisis of 2008-2009 simply reinforces her thesis. Capitalism in its contemporary form is a system that finds destruction and reconstruction as an effective way to maximize profits, political control and a pervasive form of survival.

The book shows that it is of the utmost importance to be acquainted with historical process in order to understand current trends.

However, it is a pity that the author did not develop the whole story of shock doctrine in the case of Mexico. She only makes a brief mention of it. Mexico, as a fundamental partner of US, enforced through NAFTA, has seen fundamental and destructive changes in its economy, with negative results for the majority of its population. What it is striking, and that diferentiates it from the rest of Latinamerican experiences, is that the process was undertaken under peaceful terms, thanks to a political party that monopolized power for 70 years, and also thanks to the rightist party that won the 2000 presidential elections. Fraud and corruption have been the main ingredients for the domination of the US southern neighbor.