I’ve now read this books two full times with some parts going for 3  times,  I was both listening to Klein read as I followed a long but sometimes just reading when I wanted a second go at a sentence or paragraph but sometimes just listening when it was so smooth and easy to follow.  It’s a really good book, but I couldn’t give it a 10 because I thought it was rather poorly organized and somewhat confusing about some things.  I’m so glad I read it though.  

Doppelganger
By Naomi Klein 
2024 / 398 pp Kindle 
Read by author, 14h 47m 
Rating 9 / non-fiction
Both read and listened

The title itself is part of the confusion. Doppelganger is the flip side of a person – an “evil twin” or a “psychic shadow” or perhaps someone having other similar attributes.

** But if I have a doppelgänger, then am I the other person’s doppelganger, too?  I don’t like this a bit because does that make me the evil twin to that other person? **  

Klein then explains how there are a lot of similarities between herself and Naomi Wolf, but there are also a lot of differences. Among the similarities are they are both female, Jewish, youngish, and popular writers. The differences are that Klein is a very liberal Democrat (who campaigned for Bernie Sanders in 2016).  Meanwhile Wolf has become, for her own reasons, a Trump supporting Republican.  

 As the book goes on there’s a loose chronological ordering as different issues come up starting with 2nd wave feminism where they agreed, mainly, but Wolf was more strident and had several books published. Klein is several yeas younger than Wolf so her career was a bit later than Wolf’s but then Wolf took off in a somewhat different direction.  But both women wrote about political issues although Wolf was more interested in feminist issues while Klein went for the economic and environmental issues and with her son being autistic, came across the anti-vexers and conspiracy theories right before Covid.   

During this period Klein published No Logo (1999), The Shock Doctrine (2007), and This Changes Everything (2014). 

For Wolf there was the feminist issue followed almost directly by the conspiracy theories in general although she was involved to a degree in Occupy Wall Street, the Edward Snowden affair, and finally Covid-19 controversies.  

Klein has a theory expressed in the book that people may be following a liberal-Democrat stand on general issues until they come to something different, Covid-19 for instance, and take a side-step.  She calls that a diagonal.  Wolf definitely made a diagonal,  I don’t see where Stein took any side-steps although she might have and I missed it??? (I don’t think so.) 

Does a diagonal reveal your doppelganger? Is it like a mirror showing your opposite or your shadow? And that brings us to Mirrorlands. Wolf certainly did seem like Klein’s opposite for awhile and it bothered Klein –  people kept getting them  confused/conflated and one might think Klein was opposed to the vaccines – which she was totally not.    

And then there’s the whole “mirror world’ which Klein said she starts discussing the alternate social media platforms where people understand what you say when normal people apparently don’t. Mirror World is where everything looks okay but you know, you feel, that it’s not. It happens when someone you know well and love gets too involved in conspiracy theories and apparently falls down some rabbit hole. They now live in the mirror world and you seem very strange to them.

Part Four,  the last chapters, deals with a variety of things like Israel and Palestine, especially topical right now.  But she talks about Red Vienna, the socialist utopia (almost?) in Vienna prior between WWII and 1934 and Hitler. p 328 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna

Klein gets very determined and almost excitable in the last chapters.  I know she’s talking about an impossible dream, the idealistic pinnacle and I’m much too pragmatic to believe we can ever get there entirely. But she has a LOT of good ideas which, if ever given the opportunity we should grab a few. “If you don’t know where you’re going,” as my old Public Administration professor used to say, “any road will take you.”