Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador USA, 1999. 490 pages. Website at www.nologo.org

The daughter of American draft expatriates, Canadian Naomi Klein came out with this stunning book just as the Seattle demonstrators began addressing some of the same issues. This was a four-year effort, almost a "Das Kapital" for Generation Y. Klein is mainly concerned with the marketing influence of corporations such as Nike. But to her credit, she also visits a free-trade sweat zone in the Philippines. (How can labor organize there, when a strike would mean that the U.S. contractor merely switches to another contractor in some other sweat zone within a week?) Klein even has an excellent chapter on the shortcomings of recent campus-based activism, and another on the crummy service jobs available for young people today.

There are problems with this book as well. Some of her analysis of marketing and branding should be focused on the overproduction that leads to false consciousness and over-consumerism. Add to this the huge role played today by speculative international finance, which is basically nonproductive. There's more happening here than branding; Nike's swoosh logo phenomenon is more of a symptom than the real problem. In the end, Klein's fascination with "culture jamming" and adbusting (painting moustaches on billboards, for example) won't provide the answers and activism that we need. Nevertheless, this important book should be read by everyone.
ISBN 0-312-20343-8

Search the NameBase site: While the best way to search for names is to use NameBase, most can also be found here by using only first and last name, separated by a single space, with no quotation marks.
Gloria Steinem and the CIA

Name index for Klein,N. No Logo. 1999

try a NameBase search          home page          register