There are very few books that really help us understand the present. The Shock Doctrine is one of those books. Ranging across the world, Klein exposes the strikingly similar policies that enabled the imposition of free markets in countries as different as Pinochet's Chile, Yeltsin's Russia, China and post-Saddam Iraq. Part of the power of this book comes from the parallels she observes in seemingly unrelated developments ... Yet I remain unconvinced that the corporations Klein berates throughout the book understand, let alone control, the anarchic global capitalism that has been allowed to develop over the past couple of decades—any more than the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. Rightly, Klein insists that free market ideology must bear responsibility for the crimes committed on its behalf—just as Marxist ideology must be held to account for the crimes of communism. But she says remarkably little about the illusions by which neo-liberal ideologues were themselves blinded.

In an early chapter, Klein compares radical capitalist economic policy to shock therapy administered by psychiatrists ... The connection with a rogue C.I.A. scientist is overdramatic and unconvincing, but for Klein the larger lessons are clear ... Klein is not an academic and cannot be judged as one. There are many places in her book where she oversimplifies. But [Milton] Friedman and the other shock therapists were also guilty of oversimplification ... the case against [their] policies is even stronger than the one Klein makes ... she travels the world to find out firsthand what really happened on the ground during the privatization of Iraq, the aftermath of the Asian tsunami, the continuing Polish transition to capitalism and the years after the African National Congress took power in South Africa, when it failed to pursue the redistributionist policies enshrined in the Freedom Charter, its statement of core principles. These chapters are the least exciting parts of the book, but they are also the most convincing ... Some readers may see Klein’s findings as evidence of a giant conspiracy, a conclusion she explicitly disavows. It’s not the conspiracies that wreck the world but the series of wrong turns, failed policies, and little and big unfairnesses that add up. Still ... Klein ends on a hopeful note, describing nongovernmental organizations and activists around the world who are trying to make a difference.

Klein is an energetic and insatiably curious traveller who seems to have something vivid and illuminating to report about almost every part of the world. Some might feel, however, that she skips lightly over evidence that complicates her narrative of innocence besieged by corruption. It would be unfair to suggest that if she hadn’t believed it, she wouldn’t have seen it with her own eyes. But her high-altitude generalizations seem less fresh than her ground-level observations ... Klein is willing to go [far] to deny the decisive role of imbecility and obliviousness in the making of the Iraqi disaster ... Klein’s basic argument is curiously difficult to follow. One problem is her conflation of free-market ideology with corporate greed ... Some of the most memorable passages in Klein’s book describe stunning examples of influence peddling, sweetheart deals, kickbacks, corporate scams, nepotism, fraudulent overcharging, cronyism, asset seizures and electoral corruption ... This hope that ordinary people will ‘at last’ take control of large historical processes may explain, by backward reasoning, why Klein assumes that such processes are now tightly controlled by a predatory elite adhering to a sinister doctrine. If that were the case, then refuting ‘the shock doctrine’ would be a first step towards wresting control of world history from the corporate masters. Unfortunately, the developments she so tellingly describes, such as the proliferation of barricades and other techniques for managing class conflict, have deeper and more impersonal roots than greed and ideology. Current trends may be stymied or reversed, but, if this happens, Klein’s admirable aspirations for democracy and justice are not very likely to play much of a role.

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine...tries in vain to discredit the economic system that brought about modern America, the Industrial Revolution, and high standards of living around the world. The energy of the book is real and there is no doubt it will mobilize most of its readers to higher levels of outrage and action. It's probably the most effective brand of emotional nonfiction to be published this year. But when it comes to the underlying message, and the standards of evidence used to support it, The Shock Doctrine is a true economics disaster ... Most of the book is a button-pressing, emotionally laden, whirlwind tour of global events over the last 30 years ... The book offers not so much an argument but rather a Dadaesque juxtaposition of themes and supposedly parallel developments in the global market. Above the excited recitation stands Milton Friedman as the überdemon of the march toward global tyranny and squalor. Ms. Klein's rhetoric is ridiculous ... Rarely are the simplest facts, many of which complicate Ms. Klein's presentation, given their proper due ... the reader will search in vain for an intelligent discussion ... If nothing else, Ms. Klein's book provides an interesting litmus test as to who is willing to condemn its shoddy reasoning.

Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly ... Much of the moral weight of Klein's indictment rests upon the morbid pleasure her subjects appear to take in the immiseration that permits their success ... Klein repeatedly implies that there is something immoral about using crises to advance the right-wing agenda without explaining why this is so ... Her interpretive method is an extremely crude sort of Marxist economicism ... Klein's model leaves little room for the non-economic varieties of conflict, such as ethnic or sectarian strife ... Almost nothing can confound Klein's cookie cutter ... in full defiance of everything that we know about post-war Iraq, Klein proceeds to argue that what might superficially appear to be a total failure is, in fact, the successful culmination of the war's purposes ... Klein's strength as a writer is her interest in the ground level of things ... Yet ... Her ignorance of the American right is on bright display ... Naomi Klein's relentless lumping together of all her ideological adversaries in the service of a monocausal theory of the world ultimately renders her analysis perfect nonsense.

Assiduously researched, energetically expressed, Klein’s report bears an ideological perspective that won’t leave readers neutral about her economic interpretations.

Klein's economic and political analyses are not always meticulous. Likening free-market 'shock therapies' to electroshock torture, she conflates every misdeed of right-wing dictatorships with their economic programs and paints a too simplistic picture of the Iraq conflict as a struggle over American-imposed neo-liberalism. Still, much of her critique hits home, as she demonstrates how free-market ideologues welcome, and provoke, the collapse of other people's economies. The result is a powerful populist indictment of economic orthodoxy.

The author follows John Perkins...and others in pointing an alarmed finger at a global 'corporatocracy' that combines the worst features of big business and small government. The difference is that Klein’s book incorporates an amount of due diligence, logical structure and statistical evidence that others lack. As a result, she is persuasive ... Her account of that methodology’s consequences in Iraq, as mass unemployment coincided with the disbanding of a standing army whose soldiers took their guns home, leaves little doubt as to why there is an enduring insurgency. Required reading for anyone trying to pierce the complexities of globalization.