Rating: 
Summary: A brilliant academic work
Review: Klein has done her research and this book is a real eye-opener for any average consumer, such as myself. I'm not about to take to the streets smashing up MacDonalds stores in protest. But it will affect the way I look at consumerism and global branding in the future. It has also given me a greater understanding of the mind-set of those that do choose to protest consumerism and global capitalism and what they feel they are fighting against.
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Summary: Truly Sad
Review: The logic of this fantasy is even more convoluted than the Editorial Review of Amazon.com's own Ron Hogan (above). Please, leftists: Consumers buy what they want to because they want to and because, in a free society, they can. This concept is called freedom. You should look into it. (In doing so, you may want to visit Cuba and see firsthand how wonderful life is without "logos" and the freedom they are a product of.)
Rating:
Summary: Highly readable
Review: I read the book in a few days. Very readable and engrossing.
Rating: 
Summary: I bought the guilt
Review: I know a few people who have made it all the way through Naomi Klein's "No Logo" now. Not just dipping into it. Not just reading the cool stuff about political activism. I know people who strapped on the grappling hooks and traversed the book the whole way through, from one side to the other. You might think I'm making a big deal about getting the whole way through. It's just "No Logo" is one of those books. Like Don DeLillo's "Underworld". A book you feel you should read that you constantly put off. Well. I conquered Don DeLillo (it's worth it, it's worth it, the book is truly truly great), I won't let Naomi Klein beat me. I started reading it alongside another book, a novel - figuring that the novel would offer light relief from the - weight of Naomi Klein's book. Only I ignored Naomi and read the novel instead. When I finished the novel and looked at "No Logo" (I was stuck on page 60, just before the photo of Richard Branson), I felt guilty and decided to devote myself to the cause: this wouldn't beat me, I would finish it and see what I could see. Part of it was that I felt like a failure. That's what "No Logo" does. If you're not a political activist, if you're not campaigning to have sweatshops outlawed, if you haven't defaced a billboard or a website, if you want things - if you like things - (and by things, I mean everything from movies through to shoes), you will feel like a failure. You are not putting your time to the best possible use. Which isn't to say "No Logo" is a bad book. By no means. "No Logo" is a great book. An important book (but, oh, how those words make your heart sink, right?). Naomi Klein is like a political God, an all-seeing eye. She knows everything. Such-and-such did such-and-such (which proved a failure because). Retrospect allows her to correct and revise. She is advancing a cause built on what happens next. Could be that what happens next is a damp squib. Nobody knows. Could be that what happens next changes everything. You read "No Logo" and you want the world she wants. At the same time, you live in the world and you owe money and you have to pay bills and clothe your children and it's a hard thing to do. Political decisions are fine for those who are not daily chastised by the limits of what they can cope with. You are not an extreme. You are not living in an export processing zone. You work. You make money. Not enough money, but not 6 cents a day. Liberal guilt, liberal guilt, liberal guilt. You feel you are making excuses at the same time you think, no, I'm just living a life like a hundred million other people. What a terrible thing that is. I'm a bad person. "No Logo" does not make me want to run out and change the world. Although it does help me understand those that have the privilege to run out and change the world, and applaud them (in a way). Part of me thinks that those free enough to campaign - people who don't have to work, or worry about debts, or wonder about what they are going to do next and can worry about what others are going to do next - haven't lived the life I've lived. And part of me thinks that I'm a bad person. If you asked me, I'd say read "No Logo". For a whole host of reasons. If you asked me, I'd say attend the next reclaim the streets march. I'd say don't shop anywhere that treats you like money fodder. I'd say think and do whatever little you can, because whatever little is something. I'd say don't sneer at anyone. I'd say treat everybody with respect because not everybody knows what you know and not everybody has the freedom to make up their own mind. If you asked me, I'd say read "No Logo".
Rating:
Summary: A call to resist
Review: I'm impressed with Ms. Klein's book. She has delved into (and maybe nearly drown) in the most pervasive creature of the new millenium: the corporation and its brand name. She conclusively shows that the brand name is everywhere, and that the multinational now defines our attitudes, culture, and value systems. The brand name no longer piggy backs on music, art, geographical space, sports, and schools for exposure, but rather they increasingly CREATE these things. And that's dangerous. Dignity, meaning, relevance are all undermined by corporate "business as usual". But the best, and most inspiring part of No Logo is Klein's recognition of a swelling movement: anticorporatism. Folks are identifying the problem, and they're complaining, rebelling, and culture jamming. Imagine the successes of the civil rights and feminist movement, and consider that this next sweep of consciousness and activism is about to begin. Klein's book documents its inception, and we'll all want to hop on board.
Rating:
Summary: Solid and stolid
Review: Sometimes I get the feeling that our so-called postindustrial society is trying to invent a new kind of person, one without soul, inner life or creative center. A special, new kind of creature, that mirrors consumer culture in being nothing more than a one-dimensional reflection. Klein's book reinforces that suspicion. Not that she tries to feed low-level paranoia like mine. Her work is solidly sensible, humane, and in the best tradition of heart-felt expose'. In this book, she's not 'into' evolutionary reversals, science fiction psychology or the mind of the consumer. Instead she exposes over and over to a fault, the merciless political economy of an industry based on sweat shops, enterprise zones, and celebrity prostitution. In short, it's the dirty truth behind the divine logo. I don't know why the book didn't leave me as riled-up as I think it should. Maybe I wanted her to ask: what's wrong with these people who worship logos, who build their lives around the graven images of capitalism, what is missing that they so confuse appearance with reality. Then I think of myself. My own perceptions and preferences and I know I've been colonized too. These insidious agencies of commercialism work their way into every facet of life, like it or not. This is a mindsnatching world we're creating and Klein is helping to hold up a mirror. Reality isn't just another 'sign' in an endless parade of postmodern logos. It's real and for those who can't find it, reality is there in the sweatshops of Cavite, in the desperation of union organizers, in the plight of people trying to buy an identity for the price of a corporate symbol. Ours is not a promising new world, it's a cruel disconnected world that no longer tells the difference between heart-break and market-share. The temperature of our internal thermometer is nearing comatose. Like the ad-busters of Klein's book, let's fight back.
Rating: 
Summary: No Balance
Review: Abandon all hope ye who enter here. Naomi Klein is one skilled writer and you can only thank some higher being that she has used her intellectual wit and analytical persistence to combat multi-million dollar companies as opposed to verbally carpet-bombing innocent bystanders such as uncovering journalists like herself. Just like her compadre in anti-corporate crusading, Michael Moore, Klein saves little ammo, let alone love, trust or respect, for anything ending in "Inc." and operating in anything closely resembling services or other low skilled labour areas. "These companies are our enemies" is a central message of this book and one that is continuously ground into the reader in various shapes, lest we not forget it. In terms of execution, No Logo leaves little to wish for. Well-written, footnoted and well-researched within the area of focus, the book takes us through the areas of society which have been permeated by the greedy ghouls of money-grubbing behemoths over the last decades. No stone is left unturned; education, the service sector, manufacturing, media, and one cannot help but wonder what the text will do to the paranoid reader since basically anything but breathing may be "giving in" to the evil mongers. If you are the accusatory type, and let's face it, most of us enjoy a good fights, especially one that is all about kicking the butt of the rich and scoring a few points for the ordinary, unknowing everyman of Americana, No Logo will not disappoint. That is also where the book runs into trouble. It is guilty of exactly the same phenomenon that most anti-establishment groups suffer from today: myopia and anger for anger's sake. If you have an ambition to uncover and analyse something in order to defend a certain point of view (like Klein does in No Logo), it is always wise to respect and understand the opposite side. This is precisely the problem that most groups and accusatory voices in the media run into. It is one thing to present an argument and back it up with complimentary viewpoints and facts. It is quite another to present a standpoint and then analyse whatever happens to pass by this "analytical" lens, from this dogmatic perspective. Klein is on a mission to castrate the evil empires that are Nike, Microsoft, McDonald's and so on. But in doing this, she becomes highly one-dimensional, a fact that runs the risk of boring many readers in the long run. And that's when the serious trouble starts, since getting the message out is what No Logo is all about. If you want to see cruel intentions whenever you look out the window, you are sure to find it in everything and everyone. The problem then is that what was once factual (fact: there are some people out there that really are out to hurt and steal) now becomes subjective, and subjective viewpoints are always so much less interesting to listen to, let alone read. The one-sided perspective also evaporates any chance for the other side to score a single point, and as we all know, good dramatization just like good journalism needs a battle where both the protagonists (in this case the poor, innocent consumers and labourers) and the antagonists (McEvil Corp. et al) score points. The myopic view also raises another interesting question. This book is basically a statement on cultural and commercial imperialism. Well, what else is more imperialistic than imposing foreign viewpoints in a society where they have no natural place? Indeed, it is highly problematic that companies like Nike do business in foreign countries and adopt the general business practices of that region. But is just as troublesome when occidental do-gooders come to redeem these places and save them from whatever undemocratic principles they've been slaves to. Who are westerners to acts as global policemen and impose rules to spare our sensitive media-groomed souls from having to see things like child-labour? Who are we to declare incapacity of people to judge for themselves and take decisions of where to work and under what conditions? It is more interesting to argue about this than to arrive at an answer, which is as impossible as having liberals and socialists agree in politics. But to completely shut out this discussion of a book that intends to "take aim at the brand bullies" severely damages both the credibility and the level of importance that No Logo could have achieved. No side in the discussion about corporate (ir)responsibility needs more one-dimensional cannon-fodder. What's needed is a more philosophical discussion that takes in such aspects as conflicting viewpoints, and things that are unseen (such as the fate of children that are sacked from Asian factories that have been "liberated" by enclaves of Klein, Moore et al?). For the time being, No Logo serves as little more than a political pamphlet, albeit an amusing and at times informative one at that.
Rating:
Summary: Thanks Naomi
Review: no logo by naomi Klein changed my life litteraly. No really... It opened my mind to the fact that companies steal money from us. For example, jockey boxers are less expensive than the Tommy Hilfiger one, but it's Jockey that makes the two of them... And it continues like that troughtout the book.. Also, for my college course, it helped me a lot. Especially in my Humanities class when i had to do an oral on product branding. And it's the only book around that talks about this subject. Thanks to you naomi. It helped me trought my homework, but also, it helped me realised that those companies use us every day and we don't even know it... Now that i've read the book, i can shop better.
Rating:
Summary: A classic statement of the Seattle generation
Review: "What haunts me," confesses 29 year-old Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, " is a deep craving for release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom." It is this sense of claustrophobia and impulse for liberation , in a culture where physical and mental space has been overrun by the voracious marketing frenzies of brand-name corporations that, No Logo, perhaps the first serious statement of the Seattle generation, expresses. Klein's calm journalistic irony is a touchstone of sanity through the grotesque absurdities of the "new branded world" - the American schoolchildren who design Burger King adverts in lessons and eat lunch sponsored by Disney, the "street snitches" employed to inform on their friend's new clothing tastes for desperate corporate 'cool hunters' in some horribly comic hybrid of Stasi-style capitalism, through to the pinnacle of corporate transcendence; human branding, in the form of the ubiquitous Nike swoosh has now become the most sought after symbol in American tatto parlours. "I wake up in the morning and look down at the symbol. It reminds me what I have to do, which is 'Just Do It,'" says one 24 year old internet entrepreneur with a swooshed navel. Yet, according to Klein, it is the emotionally intense relationships with consumers generated by lifestyle brands like Nike and Tommy Hilfiger that has sparked visceral anti-capitalism of the Seattle generation. Suffocated as consumers, many members of the cherished youth demographic have been discarded as workers, needed only as service sector temp fodder. Opinion polls in the US show that younger people have adopted 'survivalist' attitudes anathema to older generations. Yet just as this can ingrain a desire to be the next Bill Gates, it can also instil a militant dissonance with the values of corporate capitalism. As Klein points out, far from selling out, a significant proportion of the younger generation has simply not bought in. Disdained by the economy, this generation has been quite prepared to look along the webs spun by the global brands to the sweatshops of Indonesia and China, to the institutions which facilitate corporate dominance, and to target corporations directly as never before. "You might not see things on the surface yet but underground, it's already on fire," says Indonesian writer, YB Mangunwijaya, at the beginning of No Logo. No Logo is a classic statement of the existential undercurrents of our age, the inchoate strands of a new resistance. Whether they can be forged into a coherent alternative remains to be seen.
Rating:
Summary: An eye opener!
Review: One of my favourite books. It catalogues how Nike and other large companies are abusing workers in their third world factories, and how western consumers are being blatantly ripped off (an example. Nike shoes cost about £5 to make but often sell for over £80! )
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