The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein
Published 2007 · 744 pages · 180,000 words · about 12 hours at an average pace · History, Nonfiction, Politics & Society
How hard is The Shock Doctrine to read?
The Shock Doctrine scores 30 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 32 out of 100
- Economic and political vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Abstraction: 38 out of 100
- Economic theory grounded in historical case studies.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Dense with historical evidence and political analysis.
- Narrative indirection: 100 out of 100
- Chronological case studies building an argument.
- Symbolic density: 18 out of 100
- Shock as organizing metaphor.
- Ironic distance: 18 out of 100
- Controlled anger at disaster capitalism.
- Resolution withholding: 15 out of 100
- The pattern continues.
- Structural complexity: 28 out of 100
- Seven parts covering different crises.
How The Shock Doctrine is regarded
The Shock Doctrine holds a literary regard score of 47 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.