The Year of the Naomis--Wolf and Klein--Both with Great Messages
If you read two books this entire year before election day, make them books by the Naomis—Wolf with The End of America and Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.
Naomi Wolf’s title, “The End of America: a Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,” is an attention grabber.
End of America? Didn’t we just have Francis Fukuyama missing the cultural deadline (as well as reality) with “The End of History”?
If there’s one thing to be learned about predicted ends, it’s that they are not often true. Now, having said that (and thereby conserving my predictive powers for another day), Wolf is no alarmist, no stranger to writing about the current state of events and no neophyte researcher of historical archives. In a recent Op-Ed in my favorite rag, the Washington Post, she writes;
Is America still America if millions of us no longer know how democracy works?
When I speak on college campuses, I find that students are either baffled by democracy's workings or that they don't see any point in engaging in the democrati…