Doppelganger

A Trip into the Mirror World

By: Naomi Klein

Narrated by: Naomi Klein

2024 Women's Prize for Non-Fiction, Winner
2023 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 New York Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 Audible.com Best of the Year, Long-listed
2023 The Guardian (UK) Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 Slate Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 Esquire Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 Barnes and Noble Best New Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, Short-listed

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.

©2023 Naomi Klein (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“It seems ever more possible that our society might collapse under the sheer weight of nonsense and performance and crazy misinformation that overwhelm our infoworld. With her trademark clarity and perception, and with chemo-level doses of wit and common sense, Naomi Klein goes further than anyone has so far in helping us understand that buzzing and confounding mess, and to see some ways out. If ever a book was necessary, it’s this one.”—Bill McKibben, author of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon and Falter

“Naomi Klein’s thoughtful and honest inquiry into the troubling duplication of her name and the distorted appropriation of her views becomes the occasion for an incisive account of how the Right has appropriated Left discourses, producing a nightmarish doubling that has plunged some of us into silence. Klein moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times, showing us how to resist the lures of Fascism with militant humility and connection, letting ourselves be upended by what we thought we could not bear to see so that we can face and build an affirmative future.”—Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble and The Force of Nonviolence

“Naomi Klein is one of our most important intellectuals, distilling the political economies of corruption and crisis in our time. Here she plunges into the topsy-turvy world of doubles and mirrors to show that the growth of the right is not a case of malignancies infecting our otherwise pure societies; rather, it’s a matter of our own fears, insecurities, and defense mechanisms, all of them rooted in a savagely unequal and violent society. Klein writes with humor, enormous bravery, and humbling vulnerability. This is an extraordinary book.”—Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

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.

Don't miss this one

Excellent analysis and commentary on our times and our role as citizens of our shared Earth. Klein skillfully disrupts the various binaries we humans have constructed that prevent us from seeing ourselves clearly, as complex beings always also shaped by our circumstances and with a responsibility towards each other. She writes in such an approachable, clear manner. This book is not only profound and desperately needed right now, it is also an absolute pleasure to listen to. Don't miss it. You will walk away changed.

The evolving reflections, refractions

I’ve found each of Klein’s book paradigm changing. This one seemed like an interesting memoir tidbit at first. Then evolved into the hall of mirrors we live in. Familial ones. Cultural ones. Internal ones. Historical ones. A view of how the best and worst are reflected forward and how we are made up of our relationships with the evolving fragments of the mirror reflections.

Brilliant

This is such an intelligent piece of work. There is much to learn, consider, study and acknowledge. A great amount of material is covered. So interesting, couldn’t put it down.

Very well researched and comprehensive. Extremely interesting and timely.

One of the best audible books I have listened to! Strongly recommend! Helped me to better understand the political environment we are currently facing.

recommending this all over the gd place

i've been recommending this all over the gd place. family, friends, strangers. it clarifies some enormous juxtapositions of our time.