I’ve long held the opinion that Naomi Klein is one of the brightest thinkers of our time, and that’s why I was eager to read Doppelganger even though the premise confused me a little bit. I’d never heard of Naomi Wolf, whom Klein considers a doppelgänger of herself, and through whom all kinds of opposites and so-called mirror worlds are analyzed. Thankfully Klein takes time to introduce her to the reader, and as the point of the book is their similarities, she ends up being quite upfront and personal, which I found interesting. And interesting are the topics as well, which include far right politics, the climate crisis, conspiracy theories, covid and Israel-Palestine. The lastly mentioned subject is not what I expected to find in this book, but something I direly needed.

I’ve felt like I lack context on what is now happening in Gaza, and Doppelganger helped with that. Naomi Klein has published the two chapters that focus on this issue free on the internet, and I can really recommend them: https://naomiklein.org/doppelganger-effect/ . It’s not like I couldn’t feel grief and anger before, but reading these chapters made me more educated.

Rating Doppelganger feels a bit difficult. I listened to it on audiobook (a Finnish translation by Silja-Maaria Aronpuro and read by Krista Putkonen) and worry I might have missed some things when I wasn’t concentrating hard enough. But, the intelligence of Klein is so evident and the topics so current, that I feel like anything less than 5 stars would be unfair.