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This is an ambitious book. It tries to tie the economic politics of Chile, Argentina, Bolivia (in the 1970s), Russia, Poland, China, South Africa (in the 1980s and early nineties), the war in Iraq, the tsunami, and hurricane Katrina into a unified theory. Obviously, certain investigative and interpretive biases are required to make this work. Third world nationalism and developmentalism, in general, get off pretty easy in Klein's analysis. As a specialist in Indonesia, I found her portrayal of the Suharto regime as a betrayal of the somehow more viable Sukarno regime a bit evasive (let us not foget that Sukarno was also an ideologue who ran the nation's economy into the ground in the name of fighting neo-colonialism). Making me wonder just how she'd cooked the books in analyzing numerous other countries whose histories I don't know so well.

That said, it offers a very provocative perspective tying together some of the most significant events of the past quarter century.

The thesis, simply put, is that the economic theory championed by Milton Friedman and his Chicago School, first play-tested in the third world in the 1970s, has increasingly come home to roost in the West and Bush's America. The gist of the theory, according to Klein, is a total rejection of Keynesian economics (i.e. the New Deal approach to combatting recession through government spending). In contrast, the three guiding principles of the Chicago School are: deregulation, privatization and cutbacks. (Sound familiar yet?) Transferriing as much of the public sector as possible to the private sector, eliminating government regulations of business, cutting back on services, protections and other economic benefits to the workforce.

The problem, as Friedman and his disciples realized early on, is that voting citizens don't actually want any of this, and will not vote for neoliberal policies through any normal, free democratic process. The solution? Make democracy abnormal. Through shock and awe. Wait for (or instigate) a state of crisis and emergency (i.e. war, natural disaster, mass torture, revolution) and then implement neoliberal policies outside (or, in many cases, in direct contradiction to) democratic will. However, as we have discovered most recently in Iraq, such tactics don't tend to "settle down" into widespread prosperity for ordinary people. Rather, neoliberal governments find that if they let democracy operate normally again, they lose power. Which is why the United States ended up supporting so many dictators. In the name of spreading free market democracy.

There are some sharp notions in this book. I'm particularly taken with Klein's generalization of "Red Zone/Green Zone" to talk about zones of normalcy and nightmare created by neoliberal policies from Iraq to post-tsunami Sri Lanka to New Orleans. She also offers a persuasive refutation of the claim that we (the US) did the Marshall Plan in Europe, but when we tried it in Iraq, Arab Muslims just couldn't handle it. Rather, while the Marshall Plan was rooted in Keynesian economics (we rebuilt Europe's governments and public infrastructure), reconstruction in Iraq has been an "anti-Marshall plan," dismantling the Iraqi state and contracting all its functions to US corporations.

The REAL problem of this book is how to present arguments like these to anyone who doesn't already concsider themselves anti-globalization liberals. I think that any intelligent person who has read Thomas Friedman and found his arguments somewhat persuasive, should read this book too, and decide what sounds most persuasive for themselves. Unfortunately, I think most people will look at the jacket cover endorsements from Howard Zinn, Studs Terkel et al. and make a snap call for the usual ideological reasons.

THAT is not good for America.