Doppelganger
A Trip into the Mirror World
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4.7 • 12 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
#1 NATIONAL BESTELLER • Winner of the 2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction • Finalist for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism • Shortlisted for the 2024 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize • A New York Times Notable Book of 2023 • Vulture’s #1 Book of 2023 • A Guardian Best Ideas Book of 2023
What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against?
Not long ago, Naomi Klein had just such an experience—she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were similar enough to her own that many people confused her for the other. For a vertiginous moment, she lost her bearings. And then she got interested, in a reality that seems to be warping and doubling like a digital hall of mirrors. It’s happening in our politics as New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers find common cause with fire-breathing far right propagandists (all in the name of protecting “the children”). It’s happening in our culture as AI gobbles up music, paintings, fiction and everything in between and spits out imitations that threaten to overtake the originals. And it’s happening to many of us as individuals as we create digital doubles of ourselves, filtered and curated just so for all the other duplicates to see.
An award-winning journalist, bestselling author, public intellectual and activist, Naomi Klein writes books that orient us in our time. She has offered essential accounts of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Now, as liberal democracies teeter on the edge, Klein takes aim at absurdist authoritarianism, using a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the doubles that haunt us. Part tragicomic memoir, part chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Doppelganger invites readers on a wild ride, smashing through the mirror world, charting a path beyond despair towards true solidarity.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Cultural theorist Naomi Klein is known for thoughtful, probing books about politics and climate change—and for being routinely confused with cultural theorist Naomi Wolf. Klein used to find this kinda funny. But as Wolf slid further into a right-wing, conspiracy theory mindset, railing against vaccines, masks, 5G wireless, and a dizzying array of other supposed nefarious schemes, the humour wore thin. Doppelganger starts as a dry, witty memoir of how the frequent public confusion went from annoying to disturbing. But ultimately, those personal experiences become a platform from which Klein takes a deep dive into the authoritarian, fascist world Wolf has become a part of. Far from cheap-shot mockery, Klein takes Wolf and her new mentor—political flamethrower Steve Bannon—quite seriously, engaging with their false narratives to the point where she starts to wonder…what if they’re right? Funny, fascinating, and downright chilling, this is an important read for our post-pandemic times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this striking meditation on contemporary political ideology, journalist Klein (This Changes Everything) explores unsettling resonances between her progressive beliefs and those of feminist turned right-wing conspiracy theorist Naomi Wolf. Klein recounts her annoyance over the tendency for commentators to confuse her with Wolf (who like her is a Jewish woman known for writing "big-idea books"), and her alarm as her "doppelgänger" veered rightward during the Covid-19 pandemic, embracing antivaxxer and Stop the Steal conspiracy theories and becoming a frequent guest on Steve Bannon's podcast. On this bleakly comic happenstance Klein hangs an analysis of right-wing populism, particularly the antivaxxer movement, as a warped mirror image of her own anticapitalist convictions. She goes on to find doppelgängers at the heart of other political ideologies, arguing, for example, that Nazism was the doppelgänger of a genocidal Western colonialism, and that Israeli Zionism views Palestinians as malignant doppelgängers much as antisemites view Jews. Klein's writing is perceptive and intriguingly personal, but the doppelgänger theme begins to feel slightly overextended, with too many variations muddling the metaphor. However, by articulating such an expansive view of the uncanny, Klein's mesmerizing narrative reflects the unique anxieties and modes of analysis that have come to dominate the online era. Like Klein's previous books, it's a definitive signpost of the times.
