Naomi Klein is a Canadian writer and social activist born on May 8, 1970 in Montreal, Canada. She was raised by very politically active parents who moved from the United States to Canada in protest of the Vietnam War. However, her parents’ outspokenness was a source of embarrassment for Klein in her teenage years, and she tended to reject their idealistic views of social justice. After graduating high school, Klein attended the University of Toronto, but quit early in order to write for a publication called The Globe and Mail. Her career as an author began when she published her first book, No Logo, in 2000, which attacks corporations for human exploitation and false advertising.
In 2014, Naomi Klein published her fourth novel, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. It details Klein’s argument that neoliberalism is the cause for any delay in climate change reform. She asserts that global warming is shedding a light on the world’s failures in creating efficient economic systems and political democracies.
This Changes Everything was acclaimed by critics and audiences for Klein’s thorough examination of this complex global issue. Rob Nixon of The New York Times states that Klein successfully “braids together the science, psychology, geopolitics, economics, ethics and activism that shape the climate question” and thus, the final outcome is the “most momentous and contentious environmental book since Silent Spring.” It also won the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, Observer Book of the Year, and was named one of the New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year.
Naomi Klein is still authoring books that deal primarily with economics and politics. Her most recent work was published in 2017 entitled No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need.
