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lizard800's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
This book put into words for me so much about how I've been feeling about the left and social movements. If you're a leftist of any flavour you really need to read this. I'm taking away a lot from this book, but this quote (which is my favourite) sums up my biggest takeaway: "every story of triumph for the fascist right is also a story of fragmentation, sectarianism, and stubborn refusal to make strategic alliances on the anti-fascist left".
Klein is an excellent narrator.
Klein is an excellent narrator.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Antisemitism, Colonisation, and Pandemic/Epidemic
milkfran's review against another edition
dark
informative
medium-paced
5.0
This was a book I couldn’t read without a pen in my hand to frantically underline every other word. I will be recommending this to everyone else I know who is also feeling similarly adrift in the bleak Mirror World of our times.
A bit of context: I was (and am, recent political forays aside) a huge fan of Radiohead and picked up a second-hand copy of No Logo as a teenager to try and seem cool after reading an interview with Thom Yorke around the time they were recording Kid A saying he was reading it on their tour bus. It left me depressed for weeks but also quietly radicalised me to the extent that in the guff of my UCAS personal statement I wrote about how much Naomi Klein and George Orwell between them had made me pick a politics & history degree. I’m not sure how useful 5 years and £81k of debt to do the aforementioned degree was but reading Naomi Klein is never a waste.
I was slightly apprehensive when I initially picked Doppelgänger up because I’ll admit to not being that interested in Naomi Wolf’s wild ramblings but although Good!Naomi does discuss Bad!Naomi in detail
(“if the Naomi be Klein
you’re doing just fine
If the Naomi be Wolf
Oh, buddy. Ooooof.”
@MarkPopham, via Twitter)
Wolf’s descent through the looking glass is more of a narrative scaffold to hang Klein’s depressingly prescient thoughts on our current predicament/ the culture wars/ the disinformation pandemic/ late stage capitalism’s final dying wheeze/- whatever you want to call it- on.
On p.322, she sums it up in her own words, describing the book as being about “The self as a perfect brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealized body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child as mirror of the self, the self as eternal victim.”
I winced a little when the first mention of the pandemic came up (there seems to have been a collective forgetting about it all for many of us?) but reading her analysis of all the madness was a cathartic debrief about it all that I didn’t know I needed.
As well as this, the bits criticising Israel from a Jewish perspective were even more powerful in light of the fact they were written before the repercussions for the October 7th attacks and indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians.
The only weak spot of the book for me was Chapter 10, ‘the anti-vax prequel’. Obviously the online discourse about autism and Autism Moms is fertile ground to harvest for a book about disinformation, and reading Naomi’s honest unfiltered thoughts on her son’s diagnosis felt raw and honest, some of it made me a little uncomfortable. It also felt the least fleshed out of all the chapters, perhaps because it was the most personal of them all and understandably difficult for the author to step back and gain some objectivity and distance.
However, in the extremely unlikely event that Naomi Klein is reading this though, can I kindly say that the call is coming from inside the house and your son’s autism did not come from nowhere… certainly not from the parent who is a high-flying academic and self described ‘seeker of justice’… who discussed the eating disorder she had as a teen… and the one who says “‘pattern recognition’ is often how I describe the work of my life” on p.226.
All of the glowing 5 star reviews on the blurb are accurate but whether the people in power or people we’ve lost to the mirror world will actually read it remains to be seen. Nevertheless, I’ll keep recommending it to anyone who’ll listen.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Death, Genocide, Hate crime, Homophobia, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Antisemitism, Mass/school shootings, Religious bigotry, War, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Eating disorder
ivvtheral's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right ... The word for the system driving those feelings starts with c, but if no one ever taught you how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing. y the rules to get the life you deserve, then its easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.
Naomi Klein (not Wolf) and her trip into the Mirror World proved to be a surprisingly light-hearted read for a topic so serious, and by its very nature, dark. This is something I picked up on a whim, having recognised her name from the much-worn copy of No Logo I'd inherited from some random, Little Free Library that I haven't visited in years. I expected little, and I received a lot.
Klein put into words a lot of the feelings I myself have had since I first began paying attention to brief mentions of a mysterious illness in late 2019. It was nice to see my thoughts, my feelings, and my utter hopelessness at the (seemingly) sudden change in western society that has cost lives and relationships, and to see it in a way that was clear, precise, and not altogether hopeless.
Contemplating capitalism and conspiracy, and their innate relationship, Klein tracks her own veritable doppelgängers descent into something other than reality; a path many have set out on since the first lockdowns of 2020. This path many took was ridiculed. Worse, those that led others down the path were seemingly immune to reason, to logic.
Impunity can drive a person mad. Maybe it can drive a whole society mad.
I needed to read this, I think, to find perspective, and to feel less alone. I think there's a lot of people who need to read this so as to reframe a lot of their feelings and confusion and general shrugging in the face of absurdism. It helps. And, it gives hope.
All of this destabilisation places demands on us: to change, to reassess, and to reimagine who we need to become.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide, Antisemitism, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Moderate: Xenophobia
Minor: Ableism
uranaishi's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gaslighting
Moderate: Body shaming, Bullying, Child abuse, Child death, Emotional abuse, Fatphobia, Genocide, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Religious bigotry, Colonisation, Classism, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Ableism, Body horror, Cancer, Confinement, Death, Domestic abuse, Gun violence, Hate crime, Homophobia, Misogyny, Racism, Sexism, Slavery, Transphobia, Violence, Xenophobia, Excrement, Islamophobia, Medical content, Grief, Murder, Pregnancy, War, and Deportation
katharina90's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.5
An interesting read that's particularly strong in its last few chapters where Naomi Klein illustrates the violent bigotry and genocidal tendencies inherent to Europe and its colonial projects.
The book is well written, covers a lot of ground and offers much food for thought.
Trying to tie all of these topics back to the doppelganger motif at times feels like a stretch? I definitely lost the thread a few times but was captivated by Klein's meandering narrative nonetheless.
The book is well written, covers a lot of ground and offers much food for thought.
Trying to tie all of these topics back to the doppelganger motif at times feels like a stretch? I definitely lost the thread a few times but was captivated by Klein's meandering narrative nonetheless.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Death, Genocide, Gun violence, Racism, Sexism, Sexual violence, Slavery, Violence, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Colonisation, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Dementia and War
rissryann's review against another edition
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
Wow.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Genocide, Gun violence, Homophobia, Mental illness, Misogyny, Racism, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Colonisation, War, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Minor: Rape and Violence
ka_cam's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.5
Interesting and reflective read on the self, personal and group identity, capitalism and conspiracy - I especially enjoyed the parts on autism, qanon, antisemitism and Palestine. Would recommend for anyone trying to process and understand our current moment, lots to chew on and discuss!
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Body shaming, Death, Hate crime, Misogyny, Racism, Antisemitism, Grief, and Pandemic/Epidemic
cerysl's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Bullying, Chronic illness, Death, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gun violence, Hate crime, Homophobia, Mental illness, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Racial slurs, Racism, Sexism, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Medical content, Grief, Mass/school shootings, Religious bigotry, Murder, Cultural appropriation, Gaslighting, Colonisation, War, Classism, Deportation, and Pandemic/Epidemic
oworthyfool's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Death, Genocide, Hate crime, Homophobia, Misogyny, Racial slurs, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Transphobia, Xenophobia, Police brutality, Antisemitism, Grief, Gaslighting, Colonisation, Classism, and Pandemic/Epidemic
Moderate: Bullying, Cursing, Death, Gun violence, Hate crime, Police brutality, Medical content, Mass/school shootings, Cultural appropriation, Injury/Injury detail, and Deportation
bisexualbookshelf's review against another edition
slow-paced
2.0
Controversial opinion alert: I did not like this book!
I’ve seen how popular this book is in my various reader circles, from book clubs to bookstore displays to Bookstagram. I’ve seen a lot of hype and not much criticism. This concerns me because I found some of the ideas in this book potentially harmful.
The first half of Doppelganger focuses on Naomi Klein’s experience with and reaction to being confused with Naomi Wolf. Klein, as a self-proclaimed leftist and anticapitalist, focuses on how disarming and alarming it was to be confused with a now prolific alt-right conspiracy theorist. As someone who somehow missed this particular Twitter drama, I was slightly interested in the first half of the book. It felt a bit like an unedited diary and, as my good friend Dez said, “All of what she says could have been in a New Yorker op-ed.” While I was curious about her story, I felt like I kept waiting for the analysis while Klein waxed on about her distress. To be clear, I’m sure her experience was very distressing. I just didn’t feel she had reflected on it in a way that deserved 200 pages. Throughout the first section of Doppelganger, I had one main question: if our culture weren’t so highly individualistic, would Klein have even had anything to write about?
Around halfway, Klein pivots away from her reaction to her experience and attempts to connect doppelgangers as a whole to the struggles of various social justice movements. Based on her experience and a cast of cultural figures throughout history, Klein concludes that the existence of a doppelganger is a natural and guaranteed phenomenon for anything in existence, from people to social justice movements. As an example, she offers Christianity’s depictions of God and Satan, casting the devil as God’s natural and guaranteed opposite. It’s possible I didn’t appreciate this book because I fundamentally disagree with this entire thesis. For those who don’t have the psychology background that I do, this perspective smells a lot like an expansion of Freud's and Carl Jung’s ideas about the unconscious and shadow selves. While some practitioners still embrace these frameworks, many are shifting to more dimensional and somatic analyses that first reject this internal dichotomy and also embrace the body as the source of many of these “unconscious” feelings and drives. For those who are interested in these lines of thinking, I highly recommend Richard Schwartz’s book “No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model.”
Beyond my disagreement with her main argument, the second half of the book also got problematic for me at times. Let’s talk about the anti-vax chapter: the anti-vax movement is a legitimate problem, and Klein offers some important critiques of it. She introduces us to these critiques through anecdotes about her son and some of the difficulties she’s faced as the parent of an autistic child. This is an immediate nope for me. Therapy and safe, trusted relationships are the place for these conversations, not a book that’s going to be made publicly available. Again, I’m sure some of her experiences have been distressing, and she has every right to want to talk about that. But a public forum is not the right place, especially when her son has no say over or understanding of how his neurodivergence and neurodivergent experiences are depicted. As Klein even admits, she doesn’t know how her son will feel about what she wrote when he’s old enough to read and understand it. That should have been enough to stop her from doing so.
As mentioned, the first section of Doppelganger is dedicated to explicating the distress experienced by Klein, a respected journalist and researcher, when she was confused with Wolf, someone whose ideas are not respected or based on valid research. So I was surprised when referring to her autistic son in the anti-vax chapter, Klein mixes up the terms “neurodivergent” and “neurodiverse.” I was not aware of the proper use of these terms until recently, and there are many of you who I wouldn’t expect to be either, as this clarification is only just now making its way into mainstream discussions.
But, as the journalist and academic she establishes herself to be in the first section and, more importantly, as the parent of an autistic child, I would have expected Klein to have done her research and determined that “neurodiverse” is an adjective that can only be applied to a group of people. Her son cannot be described as a “neurodiverse kid,” as she describes him in her book, as he is only one individual, and you need a group of people to have diversity. Even then, no one in the group must be neurodivergent for it to classify as “neurodiverse.” Neurodiversity is a term that captures how no two brains function the same way. You could have a group of people whose brains all function “normally,” according to sociocultural standards, and still use the term neurodiverse to describe it. The adjective to describe an individual who is not neurotypical is “neurodivergent.” Klein’s son is a neurodivergent kid, not a neurodiverse one. And Klein should have known the difference.
At this point, Doppelganger probably wasn’t going to recover for me. But you guys know that DNF-ing is not my brand, so I persisted. Klein goes on to cover some important social justice movements and the ways their work has been impaired by alt-right groups. I was never quite sure how these chapters and their analyses connected, nor did I think they supported Klein’s thesis about doppelgangers. I also didn’t feel like Klein added much to the conversations happening in these movements; if anything, she simply include a blurb from an activist who is contributing to the work happening within them. On top of all this, as we jumped from anti-vaxxers to Black Lives Matter to anti-semitism to pro-Palestine advocacy, I was shocked that movements for queer and trans justice did not appear in this wide breadth of topics. You know who the alt-right hates as much as Black and brown people? Queer and trans people. But somehow, this didn’t occur to Klein, which felt very much to me like a cishet person who might think homophobia is over now.
Doppelganger highlighted a lot of bad things that are happening in our world right now. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it had to offer. There are many more radical books out there dissecting how we got to where we are now and what we can do about moving forward toward a less harmful world. While I haven’t read them myself, I appreciate that Klein’s previous works have significantly contributed to anticapitalist theories and conversations. Yet, for me, this one didn’t contribute anything to our advocacy movements and did add harm in some places. With the impression I have of Klein’s former work, I can’t help but feel that she didn’t allow enough time for the trauma dust to settle. From very early on in this book, I felt that Klein was still too emotionally close to her doppelganger experience to write about it critically and reflectively. By the end of the book, I still felt that Doppelganger failed to offer any significant insights into the issues plaguing our society today, leaving me questioning what the point was.
I’ve seen how popular this book is in my various reader circles, from book clubs to bookstore displays to Bookstagram. I’ve seen a lot of hype and not much criticism. This concerns me because I found some of the ideas in this book potentially harmful.
The first half of Doppelganger focuses on Naomi Klein’s experience with and reaction to being confused with Naomi Wolf. Klein, as a self-proclaimed leftist and anticapitalist, focuses on how disarming and alarming it was to be confused with a now prolific alt-right conspiracy theorist. As someone who somehow missed this particular Twitter drama, I was slightly interested in the first half of the book. It felt a bit like an unedited diary and, as my good friend Dez said, “All of what she says could have been in a New Yorker op-ed.” While I was curious about her story, I felt like I kept waiting for the analysis while Klein waxed on about her distress. To be clear, I’m sure her experience was very distressing. I just didn’t feel she had reflected on it in a way that deserved 200 pages. Throughout the first section of Doppelganger, I had one main question: if our culture weren’t so highly individualistic, would Klein have even had anything to write about?
Around halfway, Klein pivots away from her reaction to her experience and attempts to connect doppelgangers as a whole to the struggles of various social justice movements. Based on her experience and a cast of cultural figures throughout history, Klein concludes that the existence of a doppelganger is a natural and guaranteed phenomenon for anything in existence, from people to social justice movements. As an example, she offers Christianity’s depictions of God and Satan, casting the devil as God’s natural and guaranteed opposite. It’s possible I didn’t appreciate this book because I fundamentally disagree with this entire thesis. For those who don’t have the psychology background that I do, this perspective smells a lot like an expansion of Freud's and Carl Jung’s ideas about the unconscious and shadow selves. While some practitioners still embrace these frameworks, many are shifting to more dimensional and somatic analyses that first reject this internal dichotomy and also embrace the body as the source of many of these “unconscious” feelings and drives. For those who are interested in these lines of thinking, I highly recommend Richard Schwartz’s book “No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma & Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model.”
Beyond my disagreement with her main argument, the second half of the book also got problematic for me at times. Let’s talk about the anti-vax chapter: the anti-vax movement is a legitimate problem, and Klein offers some important critiques of it. She introduces us to these critiques through anecdotes about her son and some of the difficulties she’s faced as the parent of an autistic child. This is an immediate nope for me. Therapy and safe, trusted relationships are the place for these conversations, not a book that’s going to be made publicly available. Again, I’m sure some of her experiences have been distressing, and she has every right to want to talk about that. But a public forum is not the right place, especially when her son has no say over or understanding of how his neurodivergence and neurodivergent experiences are depicted. As Klein even admits, she doesn’t know how her son will feel about what she wrote when he’s old enough to read and understand it. That should have been enough to stop her from doing so.
As mentioned, the first section of Doppelganger is dedicated to explicating the distress experienced by Klein, a respected journalist and researcher, when she was confused with Wolf, someone whose ideas are not respected or based on valid research. So I was surprised when referring to her autistic son in the anti-vax chapter, Klein mixes up the terms “neurodivergent” and “neurodiverse.” I was not aware of the proper use of these terms until recently, and there are many of you who I wouldn’t expect to be either, as this clarification is only just now making its way into mainstream discussions.
But, as the journalist and academic she establishes herself to be in the first section and, more importantly, as the parent of an autistic child, I would have expected Klein to have done her research and determined that “neurodiverse” is an adjective that can only be applied to a group of people. Her son cannot be described as a “neurodiverse kid,” as she describes him in her book, as he is only one individual, and you need a group of people to have diversity. Even then, no one in the group must be neurodivergent for it to classify as “neurodiverse.” Neurodiversity is a term that captures how no two brains function the same way. You could have a group of people whose brains all function “normally,” according to sociocultural standards, and still use the term neurodiverse to describe it. The adjective to describe an individual who is not neurotypical is “neurodivergent.” Klein’s son is a neurodivergent kid, not a neurodiverse one. And Klein should have known the difference.
At this point, Doppelganger probably wasn’t going to recover for me. But you guys know that DNF-ing is not my brand, so I persisted. Klein goes on to cover some important social justice movements and the ways their work has been impaired by alt-right groups. I was never quite sure how these chapters and their analyses connected, nor did I think they supported Klein’s thesis about doppelgangers. I also didn’t feel like Klein added much to the conversations happening in these movements; if anything, she simply include a blurb from an activist who is contributing to the work happening within them. On top of all this, as we jumped from anti-vaxxers to Black Lives Matter to anti-semitism to pro-Palestine advocacy, I was shocked that movements for queer and trans justice did not appear in this wide breadth of topics. You know who the alt-right hates as much as Black and brown people? Queer and trans people. But somehow, this didn’t occur to Klein, which felt very much to me like a cishet person who might think homophobia is over now.
Doppelganger highlighted a lot of bad things that are happening in our world right now. Beyond that, I’m not sure what it had to offer. There are many more radical books out there dissecting how we got to where we are now and what we can do about moving forward toward a less harmful world. While I haven’t read them myself, I appreciate that Klein’s previous works have significantly contributed to anticapitalist theories and conversations. Yet, for me, this one didn’t contribute anything to our advocacy movements and did add harm in some places. With the impression I have of Klein’s former work, I can’t help but feel that she didn’t allow enough time for the trauma dust to settle. From very early on in this book, I felt that Klein was still too emotionally close to her doppelganger experience to write about it critically and reflectively. By the end of the book, I still felt that Doppelganger failed to offer any significant insights into the issues plaguing our society today, leaving me questioning what the point was.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism