Linsey Mcgoey

It’s rarely encouraging when a book apologises three times on the first page for its content. First, Tim Congdon regrets that his latest book, a history of monetary policy in post-war Britain, has no proper chapters, but is simply a loose compilation of academic essays and journalistic vignettes. Second, he’s sorry for skipping between the first-person ‘I’ in his journalism, and the avoidance of personal pronouns in the more academic pieces. Finally, he’s contrite about the repetition that could have been reduced ‘with harsher editing’. Congdon is a polemicist, and one of his rhetorical tricks is to apologise for his own deficiencies before a rival has the chance to point them out.

By the time The Shock Doctrine lands on your desk, it’s hard not to feel suspicious. Seven years after her bestselling No Logo, Naomi Klein’s latest book promises to expose how natural disasters and political crises across the globe have been exploited by a cabal of secret operatives seeking fresh slates to introduce draconian financial measures of the variety championed by the late, great Milton Friedman. From Chile to Bolivia, to Russia, one finds the legacy of Friedman’s economic shock therapy, the idea that sweeping economic changes are best imposed when citizens are reeling in the aftermath of a crisis: a coup, a natural disaster, a terrorist act. In Friedman’s own words, ‘Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change.