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Book Summary and Reviews of This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein

This Changes Everything

Capitalism vs. The Climate

by Naomi Klein

  • Published:
  • Sep 2014, 576 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core "free market" ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.

In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option.

In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn't just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It's an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.

Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now.

Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Journalist Klein is a resolute investigator into the dark side of unchecked capitalism... . This comprehensive, sure-to-be controversial inquiry, one of the most thorough, eloquent, and enlightening books yet on this urgent and overwhelming subject—alongside works by Bill McKibben, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Diane Ackerman—provides the evidence and the reasoning we need to help us shift to a 'worldview based on regeneration and renewal rather than domination and depletion.'" ―Booklist (starred review)

"[Klein's] journalism won't slow down the fossil fuel companies, but it surely holds out hope for activists looking to avert a disaster... . A sharp analysis that is bound to be widely discussed." ―Kirkus Reviews

"[A]robust new polemic... . Drawing on an impressive volume of research, Ms. Klein savages the idea that we will be saved by new technologies or by an incremental shift away from fossil fuels: Both approaches, she argues, are forms of denial... . Ms. Klein is aware of the intractability of the problems she describes, but she manages optimism nonetheless." ―New York Times

This information about This Changes Everything was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Naomi Klein Author Biography

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international bestseller No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Translated into 28 languages and with more than a million copies in print, The New York Times called No Logo "a movement bible." In 2000, The Guardian Newspaper short-listed it for its First Book Award, and in 2001, No Logo won the Canadian National Business Book Award, and the French Prix Médiations. She is also the author of Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is an international bestseller and was published worldwide in September 2007. Additionally, she was a contributor to both Wrestling with Zion: ...

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