Left Bank Books presents award-winning author of international bestsellers Naomi Klein, who will discuss the book that Bill McKibben calls "necessary," "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World," at the Ethical Society on September 18th at 7pm! Klein will be in conversation with St. Louis' bestselling author Sarah Kendzior! Join us in person (admit one ticket or admit two ticket available) or virtually (virtual ticket available). Order copies of "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World" from Left Bank Books to support authors and independent bookstores!

Signed copies of "Doppelganger" are available for pre-order from Left Bank Books. If you are unable to make it in person, signed copies will be available while supplies last.

Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of international bestsellers including "This Changes Everything," "The Shock Doctrine," "No Logo," "No Is Not Enough," and "On Fire," which have been published in more than thirty-five languages. She is an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, the founding codirector of UBC's Centre for Climate Justice, and an honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University. Her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world, and she is a columnist for "The Guardian."

Sarah Kendzior is the author of the bestselling books "The View From Flyover Country," "Hiding in Plain Sight," and "They Knew." She is the co-host of the acclaimed podcast Gaslit Nation with Andrea Chalupa and was named by Foreign Policy as one of the "100 people you should be following on Twitter to make sense of global events." Kendzior has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University, where she researched authoritarian regimes of the former Soviet Union. She lives in St. Louis.

"If ever a book was necessary, it's this one." --Bill McKibben

"Thoughtful and honest . . . Incisive . . . Klein moves her reader toward the truer grounds of solidarity in these times." --Judith Butler

What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against?

Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?

Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us--and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.

Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. "Doppelganger" asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

"It seems ever more possible that our society might collapse under the sheer weight of nonsense and performance and crazy misinformation that overwhelm our infoworld. With her trademark clarity and perception, and with chemo-level doses of wit and common sense, Naomi Klein goes further than anyone has so far in helping us understand that buzzing and confounding mess, and to see some ways out. If ever a book was necessary, it's this one." --Bill McKibben, author of "The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon" and "Falter"