You can lead a horse to books... • 22 September 2007 • The SnowBlog

You can lead a horse to books...

          
Do click. Do buy.

I'm about halfway through Naomi Klein's new book The Shock Doctrine. I want to describe it but I'm sorry I can't do it without using the same words that you'll have heard applied to so many other titles so many times before. It's 'masterful' and 'magnificent' and absolutely readable and fairly writhing with horrors. And what's depressing me is not the contents of the book, because I have read dozens of others like it (though probably none as well written and researched) so the facts alone aren't surprising to me any more. What's depressing is that this book could change the world; and yet it probably won't. It will be read by the sort of people who read these books and by no one else. And yet if the information within its covers somehow reached ordinary people, the world would shift because of it. Democracy would see to that. The disgust and revulsion we'd all feel would affect the way we scrutinise our politicians, it would change what we demand of them, and they would respond or entirely lose the confidence of their electorates. That's all it would take. Enough people to read a book. And yet I doubt it will happen and there's something so depressing about that, especially for a publisher. 


Check out Em's post below, compare with mine, and see how rock'n'roll Snowbooks is when it comes to Saturday night. Thank goodness Anna is at an all-night party celebrating the first gig by a friend's punk band.  
Rob