Doppelganger

A Trip into the Mirror World

By: Naomi Klein

Narrated by: Naomi Klein

This program is read by the author.

"An elegant hybrid of memoir and social science that traces the motif of the double throughout history, literature and Klein's personal life."—The New York Times

“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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Klein’s best book yet

This book touched on all the feelings I’ve had since COVID and put it into words I could have never strung together so beautifully. I wish every liberal would read it.

Enlightening political analysis

Melanie Klein takes us deep into the divide in America and talks about why it happened and what the way forward. This is a perfect book for these times.

Very insightful, also… Something…

I don’t quite know what to say…

This book very accurately puts its finger on the sore spot of today’s society… it is very uncomfortable to read at times, because it’s insights are so sharp…

I think it is the most important book I have read in a long while…

It is also very long, fairly scattered and the doppelgänger parallels are sometimes overreacting and, frankly, annoying…

The ending is a little unsatisfactory, I would have liked more handholds for change ( but perhaps there just aren’t any, so that may not be the authors fault)

The way it is written will make it impossible for me to recommend reading it to some people I would really like to discuss it with…

But I am very glad to have read it…

(Hope this helps…)

Excellent read!

Klein is a new author to me and I enjoyed the book and her appeal to look at both sides and the influence it has on us and who really benefits?

Amazing Read, Worth Every Minute

I procrastinated starting this audiobook because of the length but it was worth every minute. I’m actively recommending it to everyone I know.