Join The Public Square at the Illinois Humanities Council, Experimental Station, and Seminary Co-op Bookstore for a special evening with bestselling author Naomi Klein, who will discuss and sign her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

For more informationabout this program, contact Experimental Station at solveigES@gmail.com. To reserve a signed copy or for additional questions, please contact 57th Street Books online or at 773.684.1300.

Naomi Klein’s bestselling book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, is one of the most influential works published about the movement against unchecked corporate power. In The Shock Doctrine, Klein examines the global policy of using moments of collective trauma and cataclysmic change to advance the goals of free market capitalism. Klein traces this approach to “Chicago school” economist Milton Friedman, as well as the more recent followers such as Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, writing that “Believers in the shock doctrine are convinced that only a great rupture-a flood, a war, a terrorist attack-can generate the kind of vast, clean canvases they crave. It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.” Using extensive research, Klein traces the application and repercussions of this shock doctrine from 1970s dictatorships in South America to Tiananmen Square, from the collapse of the Soviet Union to New Orleans and Iraq.

This far-reaching critique of the belief that free markets go hand in hand with democracy combines moving personal narratives, in-depth investigative research, and razor-sharp critical analysis—a rare combination that re-frames our current historical moment with great insight.

For more information about the book, read the recent New York Times profile of Naomi Klein.

This event is co-sponsored by Experimental Station and Seminary Co-op Bookstore.

PRAISE FOR THE SHOCK DOCTRINE

“Naomi Klein is an investigate reporter like no other….She shows us, in clear and elegant language, how catastrophes—natural ones like Katrina, unnatural ones like war—become opportunities for a savage capitalism, calling itself ‘the free market,’ to privatize everything in sight, bringing huge profits to some, misery for others….This is a brilliant book, one of the most important I have read in a long time.” — Howard Zinn

“Naomi Klein is one of the most important new voices in American journalism today. She has turned globalism inside out, and given us a new way of looking at our seemingly unending disaster in Iraq, and a new way of understanding why we got there.”—Seymour M. Hersh

“Impassioned, hugely informative, wonderfully controversial, and scary as hell.” —John le Carré

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist, and author of the international bestseller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which has been translated into twenty-eight languages and has more than a million copies in print. In 2000, The Guardian shortlisted it for its First Book Award, and in 2001, No Logo won the Canadian National Business Book Award and the French Prix Médiations. In 2004, her reporting from Iraq for Harper’s magazine won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism.

Klein writes a regular column for The Nation and The Guardian, which is syndicated internationally by the New York Times Syndicate. A collection of her work, Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, was published in 2002. In 2004, she released The Take, a feature documentary about Argentina’s occupied factories, co-produced with director Avi Lewis. The film was an official selection of the Venice Biennale and won the Best Documentary Jury Prize at the American Film Institute Film Festival in Los Angeles.

She is a former Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and holds an honorary doctor of civil laws from the University of King’s College, Nova Scotia. She was voted eleventh, the highest-ranked woman, in the Global Intellectuals Poll—a list of the world’s top public intellectuals compiled by Prospect magazine in conjunction with Foreign Policy magazine.