Scan barcode
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: Pandemic/Epidemic, Colonisation, Violence, Death, Islamophobia, Ableism, Racism, Antisemitism, Genocide, Sexism, Police brutality, Gun violence, Xenophobia, Slavery, and Sexual violence
Minor: Dementia and War
rissryann's review
challenging
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
5.0
Wow.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Mental illness, Pandemic/Epidemic, Misogyny, Gun violence, Ableism, Colonisation, Xenophobia, War, Genocide, Racism, Police brutality, Homophobia, and Antisemitism
Minor: Rape and Violence
ka_cam's review
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: Death, Grief, Pandemic/Epidemic, Ableism, Hate crime, Misogyny, Antisemitism, Body shaming, and Racism
cerysl's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Deportation, Emotional abuse, Hate crime, Grief, Islamophobia, Sexism, Ableism, Antisemitism, Bullying, Classism, Chronic illness, Colonisation, Cultural appropriation, Death, Gaslighting, Genocide, Forced institutionalization, Gun violence, Homophobia, Medical content, Mass/school shootings, Mental illness, Misogyny, Murder, Pandemic/Epidemic, Physical abuse, Police brutality, Racial slurs, Racism, Religious bigotry, Violence, War, and Xenophobia
oworthyfool's review
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism, Classism, Pandemic/Epidemic, Gaslighting, Ableism, Sexism, Colonisation, Death, Grief, Hate crime, Police brutality, Racial slurs, Rape, Homophobia, Racism, Transphobia, Xenophobia, Genocide, Misogyny, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Hate crime, Gun violence, Mass/school shootings, Medical content, Cursing, Death, Injury/Injury detail, Deportation, Bullying, Cultural appropriation, and Police brutality
bisexualbookshelf's review
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
kirstym25's review against another edition
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pandemic/Epidemic, Ableism, and Genocide
Moderate: Xenophobia, Antisemitism, and Colonisation
Minor: Eating disorder
courtney_scott1025's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.75
I hate that I liked this book. This was chosen for my book club, and after about 40% of the way through, I was committed to letting my book club know I hated it. I kept going, and wow. I couldn't stop reading. I can't stop thinking about this book. I thought the whole Shadow World thing was stupid at first and just a little out there, but once she started talking about colonialism in context of the Shadow World... This should be required reading for white people.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Pandemic/Epidemic and Ableism
Minor: Abortion and Violence
eslsilver's review
challenging
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism and Classism
Minor: Rape
meganpbell's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
Facing her own doppelgänger, leftist activist Naomi Klein explores the absurdity, inversion, and surreality of our cultural and political moment, offering piercing perspectives on self-branding and conspiracy theories, climate change and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and more. Sprawling, funny, intellectually invigorating, and disturbing in equal measure—if you get lost following Klein through the mirror world, you’ll end with your feet on more solid ground.
Content Warnings
Minor: Hate crime, Police brutality, Sexual violence, Ableism, Genocide, Gun violence, Racism, Antisemitism, Mass/school shootings, Pandemic/Epidemic, Colonisation, and Death of parent