Johann Hari in the New Statesman gives a positive review.
How can Naomi Klein top No Logo, the most influential political polemic of the past 20 years? Her first book forensically studied the bloodstains that have splashed from the developing world’s factories and “export processing zones” on to our cheap designer lives – and it spurred the creation of the anti-globalisation movement. Today, she has produced something even bolder: a major revisionist history of the world that Milton Friedman and the market fundamentalists have built. She takes the central myth of the right – that, since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have skipped hand in hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history – and shown that it is, simply, a lie.
In fact, human beings consistently and everywhere vote for mixed economies. They want the wealth that markets generate, but they also want them to be counterbalanced by strong government action to make life in a market economy liveable. (Even Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were not permitted by their electorates to tinker with anything but the outer fringes of social regulation and the welfare state.) The right has been unable to accept this reality, and unable to defeat it in democratic elections. So in order to achieve their vision of “pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions”, they have waited for massive crises – when the population is left reeling and unable to object – to impose their vision.