Rating: 
Summary: A logo rejecter rejoices!
Review: It's been years since I bought anything from The Gap, Starbucks, Old Navy, Wal-Mart(Never), and Nike and I'm proud of it. This book describes why we shouldn't buy things from companies that look at greed as an attractive trait over human decency. This book is sometimes hard to read because you see your city turning into all that Ms. Klein describes. Until society as a whole, rejects these megabrands we have no one to blame but ourselves for human rights abusues we all say are unacceptable. Shame on them, shame on us.
Rating: 
Summary: She can hear the creeping winds of change
Review: If I where a bussinness person I would know that the dot.com cultural life that we are in is just a phase that sooner or later (3 to 7 years) will burn out and a newer, far more political based culture will seep in based upon youth driven idealism. If this book was written before the WTO protests it shows the author has a keen ear for the future. This book is a must read for the system defenders and critics.
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Summary: Kids and Logos
Review: Klein's book is very well researched. NO LOGO proposes that "LOGO consumer culture" is not a benign, unbiased social environment in which consumers buy freely what they value, based on their own ideas. People are influenced by the media, like it or not. Klein proposes that because we are so involved in buying/selling/accumulating/ and defining ourselves based on brand names and products (and all the feelings/values that come along with them), that we overlook the human cost economically and socially. Her anger at this passive/aggressive social structure is well founded, in my opinion. NO LOGO is trying to focus on observable consequences of a LOGO based culture. I see them everyday in my work so I found her book very engaging.
I teach middle school and see daily the effects of an advertising-saturated cultural environment. I see students whose cultural experience is defined by what they see on TV, what commercials (which would include music videos) advertise and make attractive. Many parents work long hours, so kids are left to define for themselves who they are and how their culture/society works. As NO LOGO points out, it is that advertising at so-called "tweeners" that has kids (girls specifically) 8,9, and 10 years old dressing like they are in high school. This reprehensable sexualization of todays children is directly the responsibility of advertisers on television and marketers of music. It is also a grim comment about many of today's parents that they allow their children to dress and behave in these ways. But, because of this sexy, our product = beauty/happiness media world, it is extremely difficult not to give in. The resonsbility for what goes out on the airwaves is primarily the advertisers/corporate responsibility, as well as the parents, but not the other way around.
NO LOGO asks us to recognize the consequences of perpetuating an "everything can be bought" society. Kids are learners, not definers of their world. Kids learn what the adult world teaches them. As children's minds are sold to the highest bidder, the stakes of this delusion grow more grave. Naomi Klein would probably agree that corporations are not all inherently evil or destructive. It's a matter of scale. Klein asks that we all hold corporations accountable for their actions. It is hardly a debatable point. I applaude Klein's work trying to raise consciousness of what the real consequences of a LOGO culture are.
Rating:
Summary: Still Relevant
Review: Although some of the material presented here is dated, I feel that this book is still very relavent today. Everyone should be aware of the level of infiltration these brands have made in our society and our everyday lives. There were several ideas that I took away from the book that I felt were very important (and I hadn't really read about in depth before). I particularly liked the discussion of the 'brand and not product focus' idea. I didn't enjoy the discussion of culture jamming nor did I really like the way that she tended to revisit the same events over and over through the book (the McLibel Trial). Overall, I liked the book and it stirred my interest enough in the subject to do some research of my own into these issues.
Rating: 
Summary: Major flaw in growth rate analysis
Review: With in a few pages of this book I found a glaring error that somewhat negates Kliens argument. I'm refering to the claimed "astronomical" increase in advertising by corporations over 19 years. Klien shows a graph of year versus advertising expense (in billions). It starts at 50 billion (in the mid 70's) and grows to just under 200 billion in the late 1990s' (1996 I think). Anyway any first year finance student with a financial calculator can calculate what kind of increase this is. (ie present value = 50, future value = 195, n= 19 solve for interest) This calculation gives compounding annual percent increase of about 7.5 %. This, dear Naomi, is not by any stretch of imagination, is an "astronomical" rate of increase. It is essentially the rate of inflation. This is what would expect for any company that their expenses would rise with inflation. Note that share price growth rates far outstripped these advertising expenses. Infact looking at her figure (1.1 i think) you see that advertising costs basically followed the economic cycle with less spent in reccessions and more in the good times. You could draw a similar graph for wages expense etc. etc. Unfortunately the arguments constructed on the basis of "astronomical" increases of advertising expenses are therefore wrong as they as based on an incorrect premise. This glaring bit of ignorance on the authors part causes the reader to question how else other data and information is incorrectly presented or mistakenly interpreted. To be credible the journalist/researcher/Naomi has to take a dispassionate stance and see what the numbers are actually saying rather than what you want them to say. Any thing less, and your fooling yourself and misleading your readers. I'm not finished the book yet and I hope not to find another howler like this or I won't bother to keep going. Ps. I'm finding the book interesting, I'm just very dissapointed in such a dreadful error in logic occurring so early in the book.
Rating: 
Summary: I went for radical and found ridiculous
Review: I like many people am frustrated with the times we live in and i started reading this book hoping for some answers/solutions/new ideas, and i didn't get much of anything. It's the same ideas over and over again, nothing new, nothing enlightening. I found klein jumps to conclusions and has a very conspiracy theoryish apporach to the whole thing. I found the way she praises the "culture jammers" ridiculous. if you're looking for a book with new insights, try reading The Rebel Sell - while it's a far from perfect book it has a very unique way of looking at things, and as opposed to reading things you already know, you can learn to look at things from a different perspective.
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Summary: Good Starting Point For Wider Discussion
Review: The phenomenon of corporate cultural dominance is of fairly recent origin. I highly recommend the book for a discussion of this.
Naomi Klein presents a good description of how much of a presence multinational corporations have become in our lives. The material is well organized and very readable and although presented from a specific point of view alternative viewpoints are presented.
To me the book raises more questions than it answers, but I do not mean that as a criticism. The book shows how corporations have moved into every facet of our lives, how their presence has become inescapable. Some questions raised are: Just how bad is this? What have we sacrificed in becoming a society of consumers? Why have we allowed it to happen? Is pop culture the only culture? What is the alternative?
The book closes by talking mainly about sweatshops. This was a little disappointing because in going after this easy target it failed to address the other issues that were presented. A visit to the author's Web site was also a bit of a letdown because it focuses only on the war in Iraq.
Rating:
Summary: Wake up, consumers!
Review: This book is long, meandering, and sometimes makes mountains out of molehills. But Klein really sees the big picture of how the emerging global economy manifests itself in our trips to the mall and elsewhere. Despite some legitimate criticism this book has gotten, I took from it three core ideas that I challenge anyone to dispute:
1. Corporate branding pervades our lives. It is encroaching on our public institutions and there are less and less places that are free from the noise of advertising and logos. Also, brand quality now takes a back seat to brand image.
2. Globalism is creating a permanent third-world underclass that makes cheap stuff for shady contractors, hired by large firms who then market to us in the West. Most large retailers no longer manufacture anything and the companies that do are scattered across the poorest regions of the world, their labor vigilantly hidden from the consumer. Does a visit to a slaughterhouse make you hungry for a burger? A visit to a Chinese sweatshop might bum out your next trip to Old Navy.
3. Contract manufacturers absolutely do provide jobs in countries where options are limited but wages are often so low and conditions so brutal (not to mention the institutionalized union-busting), that they would absolutely shock most of us mall rats. On top of that, corporations generally sell the products at huge markups and reap obscene profits. That's called exploitation and it's immoral.
Update your thinking about the new global economy. There's more to it than that $5.99 Finding Nemo T-shirt at Wal-Mart. Read this book.
Rating:
Summary: Grow up Naomi
Review: This is one of the worst books I have ever read. Inconsistent, illogical, and just plain dumb. I have read material that brings up real arguments against global branding and capitalism and although I disagree with them, I think that the authors have put some intelligence into the arguments.
Klein represents the worst of the populist anti-globalization movement and I find it depressing that so many people here praise her so highly.
If I could give it zero stars I would. Don't waste your money.
Rating: 
Summary: The first section, "No Choice," is indispensable.
Review: The rest of the book alternates between ho-hum recaps of highlights from the annals of consumer activism and breathless lionizing of adbusters and culture jammers. To Klein's credit, she never fails to present both sides of an argument. But none of this stuff lives up to the brilliantly lucid analysis of our branded planet in "No Choice," the book's first section. Klein's discussion of the brands' ever-increasing reach into our very heads, as they deftly co-opt one mode of cultural expression after another, is the best elucidation of the subject I've read anywhere.
If the "solutions" she lays out in the second half of the book, such as flipping the script on advertisers by punning on their slogans, or dragging your turntables into an intersection a la Reclaim The Streets, seem rather pathetic, it is perhaps inevitable. The only really sensible response to the brands' takeover is simply to ignore them: throw away your television, read books instead of magazines, shop responsibly, and encourage others to do the same. It goes without saying that this response lies outside the scope of a book ABOUT brands.
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