Did not finish — I couldn’t get into this book and therefore won’t be posting about it on my socials.

What a ride! This is my favourite type of non-fiction, where an author takes a relatively small and specific incident, often personal, and uses it to illuminate huge and complex themes.

I became aware of the Naomi Klien/Naomi Wolff conundrum that sparked this book during Covid and followed the saga with some amusement and disbelief on Twitter, particularly during the painful episode when serious errors Wolff's (now-pulped) work Outrages came to light and her subsequent leap into the deep-end of right-wing conspiracy began. Klein takes the example of being repeatedly confused with Wolf and uses it to shine a light our current society, from social media pile-ons, to the dangers of letting algorithms do our thinking. She investigates our broken political systems and the feeling of disenfranchisement that allows people with very different views to form dangerous alliances for their own gain. It if a terrifying and eye-opening work that is thoughtfully presented and rigorously researched.

One of my favourite books of the year, and a hard one to describe as it’s like nothing I’ve read before!

WOW. One of the best books of the year, without a doubt. I also listened to the audiobook which was perfection. I have been recommending this to everyone.

Doppelganger is a strong contender for one of the best books I've read this year. Naomi Klein has long been recognized as a preeminent thinker. Another woman by a similar name and previously of an arguably similar background and political perspective has often been mistaken for Naomi Klein, to an entertaining and sometimes frightening extent. In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein inventively and fearlessly delves into the Other Side of the Internet - the far right as inhabited by fragile white women - as she follows where her doppelganger has gone and how people enter into this mindset.

Brilliantly constructed, researched, argued, thought out, Doppelganger is very much the deserving winner of the first Women's Prize for Nonfiction.

I love everything that Naomi Klein has written and this did not disappoint. What starts as an amusing story about mistaken identity turns into a fascinating analysis of the rise of the far right. Highly recommend.

This is such a hard book to review as it's unlike anything I've ever read before.
Doppelganger looks at how we deal with our identities and the current political climate. Klein mixes her own stories with smart insights, making complex ideas easy to understand. The book talks about how we handle different parts of ourselves in a divided world. Naomi Klein , Naomi Wolf, issues I hide away from, this book is recommended for people like me who have their head stuck in the sand

Thank you to Penguin Press UK and NetGalley for the complimentary copy of Doppelganger by Naomi Klein.

I'm sorry to say that I did not enjoy this book, and see by many reviews that I am in the minority.
I felt that this book was all over the place, and couldn't quite fathom how the author considered Naomi Wolf her doppelganger. Surely a doppelganger would be someone almost identical purporting to be the author. This is not the case. The doppelganger has vastly different views and interests to the author, which does not tie in well with the book title.

In addition, there seems to be so many aspects to this book and all within the same chapters too.

I managed to get halfway through this book and could not continue.

I am sorry, but this is not for me

An interesting read but quite difficult for get into as it was rather coldly written and i was expecting a larger exploration of the doppelgänger issue.

This was an interesting read exploring a world of conspiracy theories and one individuals place in this when they’re being mistaken for someone who embraces these concerns. It was full of lofty ideas and yet allowed for honest discourse about why individuals succumb to theories that some dismiss as irrational, whilst others are willing to give everything for them. Difficult to review but interesting to read.

Naomi Klein is often mistaken online for another Naomi. Only this Naomi has vastly different opinions to her. Naomi explores how society now moves through the world and interacts with the people who vocalise their opinions online (almost everyone, seemingly).

She explores how in this day and age, the line between who is right and who is loud is even harder to distinguish and how dangerous opinion-sharing can be, even to your doppelganger.

I wasn't sure what to expect with this. I thought there would be more emphasis on the doppelganger effect in general, but I feel more could've been done with this. That said, Klein delivers a wonderfully insightful and interesting book (more of a thesis, really). A recommended read.

I requested this book because I am one of those people that when in a bookshop suddenly can't remember if it's Naomi Klein or Naomi Wolf who I enjoy reading books by. I was fascinated by Klein's perspective on how the confusion has arisen and how it has affected her over time. I can see why it is a problem for her but there are sections of this book that seemed a stretch in how it connected to her central premise. Having sad that there were other sections that were so interesting and I was engrossed by. This was a mixed bag of a read for me but I am glad I read it and I would recommend it.

A fascinating book exploring the very real confusions that may arise on social media where two individuals have similar names - and the consequences this may have for individuals set in a well-written wider discussion of our digital society. Thanks to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC

Imagine you discover you have a doppelgänger, now imagine that person has controversial and radical views on the world which are being attributed to you online and no matter how much you sought to correct the narrative the algorithms proved more powerful, what would you do?

This was the situation Klein found herself in for the best part of a decade and this book is the result of her self confessed obsessive tumble into the mirror world of conspiracy theories and anti vaxxers where wellness influencers join hands with far right propagandists.

Klein’s book is in equal parts fascinating and terrifying. It seeks to explain the current state of the world and she contextualises this brilliantly by breaking down the theories and motivations by looking both into the future and the past.

It’s scope was outstanding from the rise of Trump as a political figure to autism as a precursor to the campaigns against Covid vaccinations, climate propaganda, 5G conspiracy theories, Hitler and fascism in context with colonialism and touches on the Israel / Palestine conflict, although it’s worth noting this was written before October 7th, to name just a few because I don’t believe I have the caption space to name them all.

Klein’s work is incredibly complex (admittedly I didn’t understand all of its parts) far reaching and utterly terrifying in its portrayal of the shadow world operating not particularly in the shadows anymore.

A worthy @womensprize non fiction shortlister it made me fear for the future but also a vital read for all. Strongly recommend.

I'm still not sure how Klein managed to pull this off but she did and it (mostly) worked. Some chapters lost their way a bit, but generally this is a great read for anyone who looks at the current political landscape and freezes with despair. I found the last chapter in particular extremely motivating and inspiring, which made up for some of my earlier confusion at how the threads of Klein's narrative created a whole.

This is a phenomenal book, which starts from the author's experience of having her 'personal brand' trashed by everyone getting her confused with the 'other Naomi' who seemed to flip from a feminist academic to a gun-toting, right wing conspiracy theorist and friend-of-Bannon.

In trying to understand how such a thing can occur, Naomi Klein researches the "mirror world" of the internet, exploring how feelings are used to 'inform' in an information vacuum and how anxiety, fracture, and vertigo are actually completely valid responses to our times. In not having answers to how we can manage ourselves and our communities as systems crumble, temperatures increase, and the rich get so-much-richer, the political left have enabled these proprietors of mass-misinformation on the right to thrive.

But rather than focusing on the 'left' and the 'right' and driving further wedges and isolation between people, her analysis instead contemplates how 'the system' is actually what is causing these problems. Our salvation instead could be found in coming together and being better caretakers of each other and the world around us.

The current 'system' is built on falsehoods, so it's no wonder that it is not working; it is this that needs to change. We can't continue to blame each other and expect things to improve. As individuals, we can only make small changes, but collectively and at system-level, we can get closer to a more fair and caring world. Even if that means putting our 'personal brands' lower on the priority scale.

I would recommend this book to any 'thinker' and/or 'canary', as well as to those who look at the world and feel sad. I would rate 4.5 stars, because it was very wordy in parts (says she with the wordy review). Stick with it, though - it's worth the time.

Thank you to Penguin and NetGalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest review.

I requested this from NetGalley because it was on the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction Longlist, and it was also one of the choices that I had seen as predicted to end up on the longlist. The author sounded familiar, but I hadn't read any of her previous work.

This book is about Naomi Klein, and Naomi Wolf, and how they ran in parallel lines of journalism for so long that they got mistaken for each other. But as Naomi Wolf slowly became radicalised, for lack of a better word, Klein found herself more and more interested in how this happened in the first place.

The first part of this book, which discussed Klein and Wolf's respective works and the various ways they had been mistaken for each other, as well as Klein wanting to find out exactly how Naomi Wolf went from liberal feminist to conspiracy theorist in the vein of 'vaccine shedding is definitely a real thing'. This I found really interesting because I liked the discussion about how someone can end up in that world and why they wander into it in the first place. It was at that point at the book when I realised I did know who Naomi Wolf was, because I heard about the interview she did about her book where she was corrected on a main point of her book during the interview (I haven't listened to the full thing because the secondhand embarrassment was too strong). And yes, Klein made the very good point that if you find yourself laughed out of a leftist space, a supposedly tolerant place, then where else would you be welcome?

I even enjoyed Klein talking about why it mattered to her so much, what Wolf was up to, even when her family were getting tired of her interest. Her discussion about personal brands and our different selves on social media really hit home, especially as it talked about our double selves on the internet and the blurring of the lines.

Then, however, is when the book when off the rails for me. Klein talked about vaccines and autism and how that led to the COVID vaccine reaction, which made sense when it was brought back to Wolf eventually. But then she went into talk about the shadow world of politics and that is why some of the racist/ignorant fears being voiced sound so familiar, because they have already happened during the Holocaust, to indigenous people when colonised, during slavery and so on. Okay, I'm seeing the link here. But we moved on very quickly to Israel-Hamas and how Wolf spoke up against them and the double self of being Jewish and against Israel at the same time. And the trouble with all of this, is that it was put in the last quarter of the book. Really interesting discussion points but it felt like they were only very loosely tied together under the 'doppelganger' theme, not really connected that well to the first three quarters of the book and not enough time was spent on them at all. A whole other book was needed to properly go into the points Klein was making in that part of the book.

So I did like it overall, but the last part of the book dragged for me and I felt as if the book was far less cohesive overall because of it.

3.5 stars!

Doppelganger is a deliciously dark and twisted read that oozes dark humor and is an utterly compelling read. It's a book you become so engrossed in that you don't want it to end.

A difficult book to describe what it’s about. It begins from Klein’s frustration with often being confused with the ‘other Naomi’, Naomi Wolf particularly over the latter’s comments about the pandemic and other issues. I have read both authors books and have never confused them myself, but I realised reading this that Wolf hadn’t been in my mind at all over this period and I had no idea that she was regularly appearing on Steve Bannon’s show and was now aligned with the far right.
But in many ways for me the stuff about Wolf was the least interesting part of the book. Klein looks at doubles in all sorts of forms from literature and film, culture and society, politics, conspiracy theories, the individual versus the collective and much more. Some of the bits I found particularly interesting: the idea that the folktales about changelings may have been based on neurodivergent children; the doctor Asperger and his history; Red Vienna; antisemitism and Zionism. She covers a lot, I’m not always in agreement with her but there was lots to think about presented here. (Although I’m not sure I needed to know that Tucker Carlson once did a documentary in ‘ which he recommended that men regularly tan their testicles with a special infrared light in order to increase testosterone levels in preparation for the “hard times” ahead.’)

Naomi Klein is a voice that needs to be heard.

Where the world labels This or That, she points out nuance.
Where the world spouts rhetoric, she preaches community.

The book takes some pretty weighty, polarized topics (climate change, Israel/Palestine, Covid mandates) and, with the utmost clarity and kindness, and calls for understanding

Does the book pinball from topic to topic? Sure. Is the term Mirror World slightly off-putting? Yes. But anyone who can hold tension between the miracle of medicine and science, whilst still side-eying Big Pharma, can lead me just about anywhere.

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Press UK for this oblique ARC.