I have loved everything of Naomi Klein’s… until Doppelgänger. Unfortunately, I found this book hard to get into and even harder to finish, as many parts seemed redundant

Naomi Klein bit off more than she could chew here. The premise is fantastic and is such a great hook -- I, too, have confused the Naomis at times. But the premise didn't land well in some sections and the recency of many of the events discussed made it feel rushed. I respect the hell out of Klein, though, and am certainly glad I read this one.

Naomi Klein's novel "Doppelgänger" offers a compelling narrative that delves into thought-provoking themes and engages readers with its unique perspective. The strength of Klein's storytelling lies in her ability to tackle complex issues, weaving them into a captivating storyline that keeps readers invested.

One commendable aspect of the novel is its thought-provoking content, which explores relevant and pressing societal issues. Klein demonstrates her prowess in addressing themes that resonate with contemporary readers, making "Doppelgänger" a relevant and timely piece of literature.

However, it's important to note that the novel's structure may pose a challenge for some readers. The narrative occasionally veers off track, jumping rapidly from one topic to another. This abrupt shift in focus might leave readers feeling somewhat disoriented, making it a less seamless reading experience. While the novel's ambition to cover a broad range of subjects is admirable, the execution of these transitions could have been smoother for a more cohesive narrative flow.

Additionally, the conclusion of "Doppelgänger" may be perceived as somewhat generic. After navigating through the intricate web of ideas presented throughout the novel, readers may find the resolution lacking the depth and originality that characterized the rest of the narrative. A more nuanced and distinctive conclusion could have elevated the overall impact of the novel.

In conclusion, Naomi Klein's "Doppelgänger" is a commendable work that successfully tackles significant societal issues. While the novel's strengths lie in its thought-provoking content, readers should be prepared for occasional challenges in navigating the structure. The rapid shifts between topics and the somewhat generic conclusion may leave some longing for a more cohesive and impactful conclusion. Despite these critiques, "Doppelgänger" remains a compelling read for those who appreciate a deep exploration of contemporary issues in fiction.

Doppelganger presents an interesting and thought provoking perspective, explaining the personal challenges arising from mistaken identity and the broader implications of conspiracy theories, right wing populism, and misinformation. It’s an exciting and unique examination of our recent times. Highly recommended. I was provided an ARC of this book by NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Really thought-provoking, self-aware and genuinely made me feel smarter. At times some of the chapters felt tangential, but it was still a wonderful book

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pages. 2023.

More than 10,000 Palestinians and counting—including thousands of children and dozens of journalists—have already been killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since the shocking October 7th Hamas attacks into Israel. An Israeli blockade is starving Gaza of food, water, and energy while the IDF pummels it with bombs and artillery fire, including strikes on hospitals, apartment buildings, refugee camps, universities, bakeries, and civilian convoys, sometimes massacring hundreds of people at a time. Documentation and discussion of these atrocities has been accompanied by discourse and meta-discourse so contradictory and divorced from morality or reality that it can make you feel like you are going insane. Desperate cries for help and heart-wrenching humanity show up alongside chilling justifications for slaughter.

Watching a genocide unfold over social media is a horrifying and disorienting modern experience. In this context, Naomi Klein’s latest book—released less than a month before the routine daily violence of Israeli apartheid exploded to newfound levels—is, unfortunately, perhaps even more timely than anticipated. In Doppelganger, Klein (partially) turns away from her normal focus on climate justice and corporate malfeasance towards a semi-biographical examination of the dangerous and distorting political and technological mirrors of our modern world. After being confused with the liberal feminist writer turned anti-vaccine crusader Naomi Wolf for years, Klein draws on history, politics, art, and psychology to figure out what exactly happened to her personal doppelganger and follows those threads to their systemic roots.

Wolf has become a regular guest on former Trump advisor Steve Bannon’s podcast, which Klein spent many hours listening to and analyzing for Doppelganger. This early part of the book dragged a little to me, perhaps because I am skeptical that Bannon is particularly talented despite being a popular figure in the “mirror world,” which Klein defines as “a world uncannily like our own, but quite obviously warped” where people like Wolf end up after mixing slivers of populist truth—such as pharmaceutical companies valuing profits over people—with ruling class ideology to form poisonous concoctions. She refers to this fusion of the Far Right and the ostensibly apolitical woo-woo as diagonalism, which is an “alliance…of convenience…with increasingly explicit shared beliefs.” Diagonalism is on the rise, fueled by the morbid symptoms of a decaying empire experienced without class consciousness.

While Doppelganger mostly targets the reactionaries underpinning diagonalism and the structural forces that feed them, Klein does include some gentle critiques of the Left. I think some of them are a little unfair—e.g. the Left will get censored regardless of our position on deplatforming reactionaries—but they are mostly clarifying and useful. In particular, Klein discusses the ways in which the perverse incentives of a privatized internet combine with our society’s liberal, individualist conditioning. She astutely describes how social media inherently forces us to create doppelgangers of ourselves for public consumption. Politics then becomes just another exercise in self-branding as we attempt to curate perfect ideological identities for clout and post our way to transforming society instead of investing in the slow and unglamorous work of building collective power with other people. As Klein details, no matter how meticulously we curate our “digital doubles,” once they exist they are out of our control, subject to the cruel projections of others and profit-seeking algorithms.

While not a new phenomenon by any means, corporate-owned social media also accelerates our incentives to magnify and fixate on small differences instead of commonalities, which sows damaging conflict and, as Klein puts it, “short-circuit[s] potential solidarities.” Unacknowledged guilt and shame gets weaponized and projected in ways we are often not consciously aware of. Dealing with the messy contradictions of our present reality in service of changing it requires deep wells of empathy, seriousness, and adaptability that personal branding politics precludes: “Brands are not built to contain our multitudes.” People are malleable and moveable, and politics is not something we are, it is something we do.

In order to create transformative political change, mass movements need to be harnessed and directed via organization. Being in an organization often requires subsuming our individual will to the collective and going along with democratic decisions we disagree with, which is a particularly difficult learning process in a society where, at every turn, we are incentivized and taught to value our egos above all else. So the forces of disorganization abound, not only from the external threat of a ruling class who wants you to fail, but also from within. Modern history is littered with organizations that fell apart from splitting and infighting, but we have a duty to ourselves and the rest of the world to align our actions with the seriousness of what we say we want to build.

As US-built bombs massacre the residents of Gaza and the IDF ground invasion rolls in, the importance of making progressive change here comes into the starkest relief. Doppelganger builds up to the subject of Israel-Palestine in the powerful penultimate chapter, The Unshakeable Ethnic Double. Klein draws on her Jewish background to recount the history of Israeli settler-colonialism and illuminate how the victims of genocide can then become oppressors: “Jewish victimization and vulnerability” became the basis for “the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine.” Palestinians became the imagined “eternal enemy” of the Jewish people, incapable of reconciliation or solidarity and inherently violent and criminal, to justify the crimes of Israel’s founding and the brutal treatment thereafter. Gaza is an open-air prison where Palestinians are not permitted to leave and inflows of resources and food are controlled by Israel, and residents of the West Bank face constant military attacks, police suppression, and settler incursions.

Long before October 7th, this was an untenable situation of apartheid that could really only be resolved in two ways: a pluralistic state with equal rights for all or the complete removal of Palestinians from their historic lands. The Israeli government is obviously choosing the latter. To riff on a term that Klein popularized, we might think of what Israel is now as disaster colonialism. The Hamas attacks are being used as an excuse to kill or displace Palestinians with complete abandon and accelerate this process, not only in Gaza but in the West Bank as well.

The only way to justify this is to not see Palestinians as human, which has been on full display with the genocidal rhetoric that many Zionists have been using. I have never seen so many people so openly support such wanton and horrific violence. But the thing about dehumanizing others is that in the process you dehumanize yourself and actually make yourself less secure by creating enemies. The Israeli government has complete disregard for their citizens who are being held hostage, many of whom have been killed by IDF bombs, and the refusal to negotiate their release. To quote Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Where life is precious, life is precious.”

At the same time, millions of people—across differences of religion, race, and gender—around the world are speaking up and taking to the streets in support of Palestine and demanding a ceasefire. The tidal waves of solidarity on display inspire faith in humanity as they generate a vicious backlash in turn. Publicly supporting the cause of Palestine has always carried serious risks—harassment, intimidation, job security—but these have ratcheted up in the last few weeks to new levels. People are being attacked, doxxed, and fired for expressing anything but total support for Israel, as speech advocating for Palestinian freedom is treated as somehow more harmful than killing, maiming, poisoning, and permanently traumatizing an entire population—pure projection and cynicism. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian and a DSA member, is facing a bipartisan onslaught of criticism and censure. Her response says it all:

"It’s a shame my colleagues are more focused on silencing me than they are on saving lives, as the death toll in Gaza surpasses 10,000. Many of them have shown that Palestinian lives simply do not matter to them."

In this climate, I feel scared to speak too publicly about what is happening, especially since I am unemployed and looking for work and I am going to become a father in a few months. But as a relatively privileged citizen of the country that is funding, supplying, and supporting these atrocities, how can I not? How could I live with myself if I stood idly and just watched this happen? What kind of world am I building for my child to grow up in? The fact that they will be born here in the US and not in Hell on Earth is simply a matter of luck, the same as it was for me.

This understanding forms the foundation of my politics. In Doppelganger, Klein says, “...we are all surrounded by evidence of the different people we might have been, and might still become, under slightly different circumstances.” How do we create the best conditions for everyone to thrive and not be a victim or perpetrator of unnecessary, politically created suffering? How can we foster collective well-being? As Klein notes, there is an inherent mismatch between the ways that our capitalist society creates conditions of precarity and competition and our fundamental dependence on each other and on the biosphere we inhabit. As these contradictions heighten amidst ecological and political breakdown, the abhorrent cruelty on display in Palestine is a terrible glimpse at what the future for more and more of the world will be if we do not radically change course through solidarity.

Anti-Zionist Jews like my friend and comrade Thea Riofrancos have forcefully rejected the atrocities committed in their name: “never again must mean never again for anyone.” And the families of the Jewish hostages taken by Hamas on October 7th have adopted a simple demand to trade all of the Palestinians in Israeli custody for all of the Israelis in Hamas custody: “Everyone for everyone.” This is a beautiful slogan that can have multiple meanings, like all of us standing for—and fighting for—the collective well-being of the entire world. An empathetic politics that recognizes our interconnectedness and shared humanity. Or, as Klein writes towards the end of Doppelganger: ‘It will not be enough to protect “our” people; we will need to have the stamina of true solidarity, which defines “our people” as “all people.”’ Everyone for everyone.

I think this book could've been an essay. It is very long (I ended up DNFing because I was so bored) and really isn't sure what it is. I think with better editing it could've been good, but ultimately it feels like a mess of ideas all dumped in one place.

I admit to being confused when I began reading Doppelganger. I thought it was going to be a thriller / horror story. It is scary, but not in the way I expected.

Naomi Klein (social activist, climate justice professor, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine (among others)) uses the frequent mistake people make in confusing her with Naomi Wolf (author of The Beauty Myth, feminist, conspiracy theorist), her Doppelganger, to frame this dense study of "other". The other side, the other reality, the mirror world, the dark twin. Wolf started on one side of the fence and over the years became an anti-vaxxer kicked off Twitter talking head for Bannon and company. Klein analyzes this transformation against the backdrop of imperialism, colonialism, manifest destiny, systemic racism, capitalism.

There's a lot to digest, including a ray of hope for our collective future.

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC. Doppelganger was published in September 2023.

Naomi Klein frequently being mistaken for Naomi Wolf - another well-known writer whose work addressed politics, but one whose views shifted radically - provides the framework for Klein's potent exploration of culture and identity at a time when both seem porous and fragile. (And yes, I am double-checking to make sure I am using each writer's name correctly.) DOPPELGANGER delves into doubling and mirroring in all aspects of political and social life as people search for meaning in an age of personal branding, collapse of faith in public institutions, and general dread in the wake of the pandemic. As Klein writes, "So many forms of doubling are ways of not looking at death/trouble. And death feels awfully close these days." She expresses some hard truths about why so many have sought comfort in conspiracy theories, how those theories cut across political lines, and the facility with messaging that people like Steve Bannon (and Wolf) possess. More impressively, she is still able to write about her doppelganger with empathy, and can even see a pathway out of our current morass. A tough read, but a necessary one.

Naomi Klein’s latest book Doppelganger represents a departure from her previous works, focusing on a highly personal subject at a time when she is eager to delve into another book about climate change. A significant portion of the book is dedicated to analysing Naomi Klein's frequent experiences of being mistaken for Naomi Wolf, the author of The Beauty Myth who has recently been fervently advocating the anti-vax movement and various conspiracy theories. Klein frequently refers to Wolf throughout the book as Other Naomi, while emphasising the striking similarities between their names, appearances, and even their partners' names, which have compounded the persistent issue of misidentification. Initially a source of embarrassment for Klein, this case of mistaken identity later evolved into an existential threat to her personal brand, echoing the themes explored in her acclaimed book No Logo.

The misattribution has caused considerable discomfort for Klein, particularly on social media during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when much of our activities shifted online. There were instances where the Other Naomi made offensive statements to netizens, prompting people to criticise Klein for things she never actually said. It was during this period that the concept of doppelgänger entered Klein's consciousness, providing an entirely new subject matter to explore. While Naomi Wolf plays a prominent role in this book, it is not solely about her. Instead, she serves as a case study through which Klein elucidates the phenomenon of individuals existing as doppelgängers, particularly as they are perceived by others.

The book meticulously traces Naomi Wolf's transformation from a feminist icon to a controversial figure associated with conspiracy theories, examining pivotal moments that have defined her trajectory. From her seminal work on feminism in the 1990s to her perplexing assertions about vaccines and geoengineered skies, Wolf's transition from mainstream media to her current platform on Steve Bannon's far-right podcast, War Room, offers a compelling case study on the current state of society and media. At times, the narrative appears to cast aspersions on Wolf, interrogating her journey from a prominent feminist author of her generation to a conspiracy theorist who has been de-platformed by Twitter seven times.

Klein's narrative provides a thought-provoking perspective, dissecting not only the personal challenges arising from mistaken identity but also the broader implications of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and the allure of right-wing populism for many individuals. This exploration becomes even more pertinent given the failure of left-wing politicians to provide significant policy guidance during the challenging period of the recent pandemic. Klein delves deep into the mechanisms that propel individuals towards embracing conspiratorial beliefs, highlighting how narcissism, coupled with social media addiction and midlife crises, can often lead to ideological shifts, frequently to the right. While this equation provides valuable insights, Klein carefully refrains from psychoanalysing her doppelgänger, instead focusing more on the sociological dimensions of the issue. Her analysis of the Mirrors World also draws from a diverse range of literature, prominently featuring Philip Roth's Operation Shylock: A Confession.

One of the book's standout features is Klein's contemplation of the commonalities she discovered between her left-leaning beliefs and certain aspects of right-wing populism while listening to Steve Bannon's podcast, a perspective that her peers on the left simply dismissed as irrelevant to their collective work. Her candid admission that "game recognises game" offers a nuanced understanding of how populist messaging can resonate across the political spectrum. Overall, I find the book to be insightful, providing a pertinent exploration of questions related to identity, conspiracy theories, and the cultural shifts that influence our understanding of the world.

Doppelganger is my top read of 2023 to date.
Naomi Klein has delivered a brilliant and disruptive exploration of identity that fundamentally changed how I think about a world dominated by social media and an isolating centering of the self.

Doppelganger is underpinned by Klein's turmoil managing her reputation and personal brand when confused and conflated with her own doppelganger; the feminist turned conspiracy peddler Naomi Wolf. Using personal anecdotes and journalistic reflections, Klein explores almost every type of doubling impacting our modern world, from AI algorithms and digital avatars to cultural stereotypes and conspiracy theories.

Part memoir, part cultural and political commentary, Klein's Doppelganger investigates how the by-products and mechanisms of capitalism coax us through a topsy-turvy "mirror-world" where identities are co-opted and manipulated. Klein contextualizes the doppelganger phenomenon throughout history and popular culture and illuminates how doubling doesn't just reflect the beliefs of individuals and cultures; it frequently distorts them.

Thank-you to NetGalley & Knopf Canada for the ARC.

I was so glad to be able to read this book! I was so curious about it. Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley. The beginning of the book was very interesting, however after getting 25% of the way through, I Did Not Finish. I was very taken with the concept of being mistaken for someone else and that part was great. Then it got more into Naomi Wolf and her background, journey, and politics. This was interesting but for me it was preaching to the choir. The book also very helpfully took a look at the bigger picture of misinformation and what it means for the future, but it veered a little too academic for me. Great cover for the book!

Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger, is a fascinating look into the “Mirror World,” a warped reality full of conspiracies and twisted fears. Klein’s premise for the book is trying to understand the ideological shift of her so-called double, Naomi Wolf. As Klein explains in Doppelganger, Wolf was once a celebrated liberal feminist author who wrote for the New York Times and advised Al Gore and Bill Clinton. In the past, Wolf and Klein wrote about similar themes, so people continuously confused the two online and in the real world due to their shared first name. However, while Klein has continued to research and write complex political analyses about capitalism and other leftist issues, Wolf has undergone an ideological shift, allying with Steve Bannon and propagating conspiracy theories. Klein felt that she was unable to look away from Wolf’s newer rhetoric, as people continued to confuse the two on Twitter and drag Klein into discussions. So she began to listen — to Bannon, Wolf, and other conspiracy theorists and darlings of the “Mirror World” — in order to understand what they were saying and how they had reached their perspectives.
Doppelganger is a comprehensive, if at times scattered, analysis of the ways in which the increased “doubling” in our culture is related to current political tensions and the new alliances of the right. Klein discusses many instances of doubling of the self in current culture, and frames her arguments with examples of doubles in literature, psychology, and theology. She explains social media personas as a doubling of the self that aims at creating a more beautiful and polished online alter-ego. She writes about wellness influencers and hyperfitness (a focus on an extreme or intense level of physical health) in response to fears about degeneration in old age and fears of becoming a worse, deteriorated alternative self, like in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Klein discusses the dangers of parents wanting their children to be a “mini-me,” a kind of additional self onto which they can project their desires and achievements. She explains how the far right is a warped mirror image of liberal society, taking its talking points and twisting them, at times reflecting them, and filling in holes in liberal discourse with conspiracies. Another type of double in our current global order, in which impoverished countries, where much of our consumable goods are made and where cruel labor practices and living conditions thrive, can be seen as a shadow outline of the West, as the underside of its luxury and overconsumption. In all of this, Klein ties together a strong analysis of capitalism, portraying its role in the doublings. She writes:
“Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right – the feeling of living in a world with Shadow Lands, the feeling that human misery is someone else’s profit, the feeling of being exhausted by predation and extraction, the feeling that important truths are being hidden. The word for the system driving these feelings starts with a c, but if no one ever taught you about how capitalism works, and instead told you it was all about freedom and sunshine and Big Macs and playing by the rules to get the life you deserve, then it’s easy to see how you might confuse it with another c-word: conspiracy.”
Doppelganger is chilling. It paints a comprehensive picture of the problems of modern society, but it doesn’t just implicate society-at-large as an amorphous, impersonal entity; it implicates us, too. The most compelling part of the book is Klein’s commentary about what this all means for us — liberal/leftist society, those in the “real world” as opposed to the “mirror world.” Klein writes: “The more difficult truth, though, is that this is a doppelganger story, and doppelganger stories are never only about them; they are also always about us.” Part of our problem is that liberal society is not addressing the failures of capitalism or the ways in which we live which are dependent upon the oppression of others. She says: “We feel the brutal futures that lurk behind the glow of our screens, the purr of our engines, the speed of our deliveries. We know the deadly prices that will be paid by our fellow human beings far and near, and by countless other-than-human beings and ecosystems as well.” The op-eds and the exposition pieces have been written; factually, we know what is going on, but we aren’t addressing it. Due to the government’s refusal to create policies and much of liberal societies’ uneasiness in discussing responses to the issues created by Big Tech and Big Pharma, others fill in the gaps, but with fearful conspiracies instead of fact-based analysis.
The number of topics and connections that Klein raises is dizzying. Her overall argument that the doubling of the self is deeply intertwined with the doubling inherent in the operation of our society seems accurate. However, her statements are more absolute than is warranted.
For example, she writes in regards to the Holocaust that its atrocities paralleled those of European colonizers in other parts of the world but that what was different was that “it was now fellow Europeans who were being cast as the inferior race.” While it is true that the atrocities of the Holocaust were not entirely new or different, the tactics that were being used by European colonizers in other parts of the world were indeed being used within Europe before the Holocaust, such as through forced ghettoization and the pogroms, and the conception of Jews as an inferior race in modern terms was written about as early at the mid-1800s.
The broadness of Klein’s scope in critiquing society on the holistic level makes it impossible to fully explain every detail — many of the issues she mentions in passing could be entire books on their own. Moreover, the reasonableness and moderation of her arguments makes it hard for the general reader to identify where they fall short without having studied that specific issue in depth. Klein argues in Doppelganger that part of the distortion of the “Mirror World” is a result of the simplification of complex problems into explanations with easier solutions and more satisfying people to blame. Klein does a good job of being careful to draw connections in a nuanced and analytical manner, but at times it also seems that the framing of “doubling” to draw all of these issues together may simplify them as well. Her arguments could be more true if she had been a little more careful to avoid simplification.
Despite the scatteredness and incompleteness of some of her arguments, Klein says something important about our politics and our society: we need to address the blatant but often disregarded ways in which our society depends upon capitalism, the ecological destruction of our planet, and supremacist ideology. As wealth inequality worsens, the climate crisis persists, and unregulated technology increasingly encroaches on our lives and affects our realities, Klein warns us that we will soon need to contend with these societal ills. She calls for action, from naming the real systems that create these harmful doubles in society, to addressing them directly. The greatest message of Doppelganger is urgency and action. Klein writes: "If our present systems threaten life to its very core, and they do, then they must be changed.”

Every time Naomi Klein puts out a new title I know I am going to love it. I went into Doppleganger completely blind. Didn't even read a synopsis. Pretty soon in, I began to find the situation surprisingly humorous. Not just because of the plight of Naomi Klein in trying to not be mistaken for Naomi Wolf but also in the absurdity of reliving such unpredictable political moments and arguments that have gone on in the past few years due to covid and the new trump world or mirror world. The entire time I was reading I could not get over the fact that reading this book 5 years ago, nothing would have made any sense. Our worlds have changed so much because of the politics and the alternate reality of thought that was birthed during the pandemic. Highly recommend this book!

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Naomi Klein, through the years, keeps getting confused with the author Naomi Wolf. This is irritating, but becomes intolerable as Wolf moves further and further to the right, with great help from Steve Bannon, spreading lies and misinformation, especially about Covid vaccines. Klein charts her life over the Trump years and the pandemic, as she follows Wolf’s ravings and she gives us an interesting tour of doppelgängers through literature and films. An exciting examination of our recent times and the very unique story of constantly being mistaken for a person you so despise.

I had my first experience with a doppelganger when I was 13. It was the first day of high school, and a bunch of kids I had never seen before greeted me enthusiastically, by name. It seems there was another boy also named David, who looked just like me, and was the same age, but who lived too far away to be in my high school. So his friends were happily surprised to see him/me there. This happened four more times in my life, and every time, the doppelganger’s name was David, leading to unexpected conversations. I never met any of them.

So with Naomi Klein, whose book Doppelganger is nominally about her own pseudo twin, named Naomi Wolf. They are eight years apart, and look nothing like each other. Klein became obsessed with Wolf, whose work she followed anyway, because readers, listeners and viewers were mixing them up, blaming Klein for crazy things Wolf said. This led to deep research by Klein into Wolf, following her every move, for about eight years (!) and it became the core of this book. A lot of the book is simply deconstructing Wolf - a withering criticism like no other readers will have encountered.

The problem for Klein was that Wolf had been going off the deep end, saying more and more outrageous extreme-right things, apparently for the attention, because she never used to be that way. She ended up appearing regularly on Fox News, and aligning with Steve Bannon on his War Room podcast, spouting conspiracy theories so fast Bannon had to slow her down. But then, online comments would slam Klein instead of Wolf, simply because they were both called Naomi. You see.

The thing is, Klein had written a best-selling book called No Logo, in which she berated readers for the fashion of making a brand out of themselves. For Klein to defend her brand would therefore be hypocritical. For her not to defend her brand could be reputationally damaging.

But then Klein sort of goes off the deep end herself. Suddenly, everything in life is a doppelganger. She stretches to find them as doubles, or mirror images or Shadow Land apparitions. The chapters of the book go farther and farther off course, with only the slightest, rationalized connection for qualifying as insight into doppelgangers. Klein says she often describes her life’s work as pattern recognition. So perhaps tying all these things together fits that mission. But it takes more rationalizing than I could muster. There is no pattern here, unless you see patterns everywhere.


Anything can have a double of varying accuracy, and any action can be attributed to a double. Plastic surgery, for example. There are two separate paths: the operated, and the natural. Every choice in life apparently means there is a double out there who didn’t do what you did. Anyone can speculate endlessly on what might have been. But does that mean there is a doppelganger out there living your alternate life for you, for every choice you made (poor thing)?

She delves into fiction, notably Philip Roth’s novel about a doppelganger of himself, mouthing off in Israel because he can pass as the real Roth, to the point where Roth has to fly out there to confront him. Then there is The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a portrait ages instead of its subject. Are portraits doppelgangers? Or are they … portraits? Are readers to accept fine fiction as evidence – of anything? And as long as she is in fiction, she adds changelings to the mix of doppelgangers. They were a way of “making sense of disability,” she says. Does that make them doppelgangers?

Then she analyses Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a classic example of doppelgangers. Easy, right? But they were the same person. They were mutually exclusive. They could never meet and sort it out. And they were not impinging on each other’s territory. They lived in two different worlds (classes) within London. They had different names and shapes. Had they been two people, they would never have met or competed for anything. If they could be placed side by side, no one would have the slightest confusion over which was which. Klein does not make the case at all convincingly that this was a classic example, unless you expand it to her theory of doubles and Mirror Worlds and Shadow Lands and changelings. But then, that would include almost everyone and every thing in the universe, from subatomic particles to whole galaxies, and everything in between.

And then doppelgangers would be nothing special: nothing to write a book about. But she has. Sort of.

A chapter on pregnancy appears. Klein’s father was a doctor and researcher in Montreal, expanding the frontiers of childbirth medicine. She said that birthing issues were his dinner table conversation, and she knew all about all the possible conditions arising from giving birth years before her own puberty. And she wished she hadn’t. I did not need all this information right here and now either. Thanks for sharing.

There is an entire chapter on autism and its short (Nazi) history. And as long as we’re there, Nazism and how it glommed onto American white supremacist Jim Crow laws for its own master race policies is examined. But perhaps the longest chapter (or seemingly so) is on Israel, and its horrific policies towards the Palestinian natives it pushed aside. It seems that every great society got to annihilate the indigenous peoples, who were after all, subhumans. All Israel wants is its kick at the can, Israelis say. If they are denied it, that’s anti-Semitism. Doppelgangers, anyone?

At one point, Klein follows up on Wolf, who is complaining about a fake social media account in her name, with 38,000 followers that should have been hers. This is pretty much the same situation Klein finds herself in with Wolf, but Wolf is oblivious to it. It all reminds me of the latest series of Black Mirror shows, the first of which portrays the horrors of having your entire life recorded and played on a streaming film service by computer-generated big name actors for the voyeuristic amusement of global audiences. Only it turns out the people that we the viewers have been following are themselves actors, not knowing they are replacing the poor souls whose tawdry lives are being enhanced for tv. It is at least three levels of abstraction at once, much like the two Naomis and their separate/conflicting quests for recognition and fame.

At one point, Klein seems about to pin it all on capitalism:
It’s as if everyone is trying to trick us in the fine print of pages and pages of terms of service agreements they know we will never read. The black box is not just the algorithms running our communication networks—almost everything is a black box, an opaque system hiding something else. The housing market isn’t about homes; it’s about hedge funds and speculators. Universities aren’t about education; they’re about turning young people into lifelong debtors. Long-term care facilities aren’t about care; they’re about draining our elders in the last years of life and real estate plays. Many news sites aren’t about news; they’re about tricking us into clicking on autoplaying ads and advertorials that eat up the bottom half of nearly every site. Nothing is as it seems. This kind of predatory, extractive capitalism necessarily breeds mistrust and paranoia.
But she goes no farther with that approach. Where doppelgangers fit in is not specified beyond the obvious thought that Wolf does not share this position. So then she’s not really a doppelganger?

Then twenty pages later, Klein puts perspective on Trump’s Big Lie:
it is a big lie, a dangerous one. But is it the Big Lie? Bigger, say, than trickle-down economics? Bigger than “tax cuts create jobs”? Bigger than infinite growth on a finite planet? Bigger than Thatcher’s double whammy of “There is no alternative” and “There no such thing as society”? Bigger, for that matter, than Manifest Destiny, Terra Nullius, and the Doctrine of Discovery—the lies that form the basis of the United States, Canada, Australia, and every other settler colonial state? If we can stand to look at the Shadow Lands even for a moment, it becomes clear that we are ensnared in a web of life-annihilating lies and that whatever the Mirror World is on about this week is neither the biggest lie nor the one with the highest stakes.
Klein covers a lot of territory in this book.

An awful lot of the book is about conspiracies surrounding Covid-19 and globalists, the new code word for Jews. She says Shakespeare’s Shylock is the Jews’ eternal doppelganger. Once again, making this fit a treatise on doppelgangers is, to put it mildly, challenging.

Thankfully, Klein writes very well, or this book would have been unbearable. She keeps coming back to Wolf and the downward spiral of her life, in front of everybody. (It likely all began when an interviewer pointed out that Wolf had misread the data she unearthed for her new book, humiliating her in the global media for weeks and effectively cancelling her book.) Klein also swings through a lot of her own story, the local politics of suburban British Columbia where she lives, and famous people she has known or at least met. The best line in the book comes from environmentalist Bill McKibben (who otherwise plays no role in the book), who said to her: “Instead of figuring out how to have a world where everyone can thrive, they want their kids to thrive in a world that is falling apart.” That’s a tombstone engraving for mankind if ever there was one.

But after nearly 350 pages, and even though Klein says off the top “As my investigation has worn on, this is the form of doppelganger that increasingly preoccupies me: the fascist clown state that is the ever-present twin of liberal Western democracies, perpetually threatening to engulf us in its fires of selective belonging and ferocious despising,” I still can’t tell you what the book is about. Or what point it makes, unless it is simply that Klein is not Naomi Wolf. But it can’t be just that shallow, can it? I mean, can she?

It is clanging cognitive dissonance to read. Had the book not had chapters on pregnancy, autism and Palestinians, it would have been a hundred pages shorter and no one would have noticed the difference. There would not have been boatloads of trolls posting “What about autistics? She never said a word about autistics!”

I can thank the gods for one thing notable by its absence: Klein did not consider artificial intelligence. If ever there was an angle to drag out more doppelganger speculation, AI is it. She could have out-mirrored Black Mirror had she thought of AI. And it would have made the book actually about doppelgangers. But what she has out there is already more than enough.

And if you disagree, blame my double.

David Wineberg

The premise of this book seemed kind of thin -- being mistaken for another author on Twitter spun into 400 pages? But Klein doesn't just riff on the infamous tweet that sparked many a meme; instead, she goes deep into why Naomi Wolf went off the deep end, going from feminist icon to conspiracy crank, and examines the massive misinformation economy that backs her up. A fascinating read.

Klein helps us make sense of our "unprecedented" times. This book is compelling, and provides much needed clarification and explanation of the pandemic, the Trump phenomenon, the conspiracy theories, the post truth era. Highly recommended.

This book is a fascinating look at doppelgangers in academia and popular culture. Klein analyzes her own doppelganger relationship to Naomi Wolf and Wolf's antivax/conspiracy theory views. Overall, I really enjoyed this one, especially the sections that were more about political doppelgangers.

such an interesting read. I greatly admire Naomi Klein's work. And I had no idea "the other Naomi" had become as she is now, so much of this book was a revelation to me.