Doppelganger

Description

Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein

ISBN: 9781250338143
Softcover, new
Publication Date: Sep 2024

Brief Description:
A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award NEW YORK TIMES
BESTSELLER | National Indie Bestseller A New York Times notable book of
2023 | Vulture’s #1 book of 2023 One of Slate’s ten best books of 2023 | A
Guardian best ideas book of 2023 | One of Time’s ten best books of 2023
Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award “I’ve been raving about Naomi
Klein’s Doppelganger . . . I can’t think of another text that better
captures the berserk period we’re living through.” —Michelle Goldberg, The
New York Times “If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these
last few dark years, it would be this one.” —Katie Roiphe, The New York
Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) “If ever a book was necessary, it’s
this one.” —Bill McKibben “Thoughtful and honest . . . Incisive . . . Klein
moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times.”
—Judith Butler 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, the celebrated activist and public intellectual
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 sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused
about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to
understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us
have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the
line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness
entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political
allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the
edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such
conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure
for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most
trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what
branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies
and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and
outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic,
medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan
Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein
uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange
doubles that haunt us—and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate
as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling
reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror
and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as
we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of
our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication?
Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning
with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way
many of us think and feel now—and an intellectual adventure story for our
times.