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Doppelganger, by Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein walks into a bathroom and overhears women condemning her for spreading conspiracy theories as one of the loudest voices in far-right media. The women ask “What’s happened to Naomi Klein? I used to like her.” Klein says nothing to the group—she’s heard it before, and she knows they’re not talking about her. They’ve confused her with the Other Naomi, her doppelganger, Naomi Wolf.

This is the start of Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, which tells the story of the two Naomis and unravels the many ways we have become such a broken society.

Klein and Wolf once shared the same political territory, critiquing how capitalism and the politicians it supports have sucked the meaning, energy, and money from our lives. Klein’s Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism argues that those in power often exploit even our darkest moments—Hurricane Katrina, the invasion of Iraq— to derail democratic norms and increase profits. Her No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies argues that, in a corporate culture, we’re encouraged to express our individualism by creating personal brands that make us all alike, broke, and hollow.

Wolf’s The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women makes much the same argument—that corporations are getting rich exploiting women’s insecurities about how they should look. The result: women focus on external qualities at the expense of their professional success.

The two Naomis comfortably coexisted in the same sphere, often being confused with one another, but both headed the same direction.

But when Wolf became a voice of the anti-vax, anti-mask movement during Covid, Klein began to take notice. Wolf was using the same message she and Klein had once shared but was skewing it to reach far different conclusions. Klein saw the government and pharmaceutical companies reacting responsibly to help citizens survive Covid through security measures and vaccines. Wolf saw these same entities as the enemy, defying our individual freedoms by forcing us to mask and invading our bodies with vaccines. The feminist position advocating bodily autonomy was turned on its heels in defiance of vaccines. Klein began to feel she was living a parody. “It was an out-of-body experience,” she writes.

Klein had a doppelganger, a shadow self, and as she shows, doppelgangers are seldom good news. They are our evil twins, representing our dark side. And they have unique power against us. (Doppelganger is a German word meaning “double walker.”)

For a time, Klein didn’t know how to respond, because Wolf could use any evidence Klein provided to make conclusions that served her own contrary position. She planned an essay criticizing Bill Gates for taking a position during the pandemic that she felt robbed the needy of essential vaccines, but stopped herself because she realized Wolf could use this same argument to tie Gates to those she felt were denying us our freedoms.

Klein takes this premise, expands it, then peels it back, layer by layer by layer, to show that what has happened to her has happened to our entire country. The meanings of words has been turned upside down. Choice, once used to define a woman’s right to make her own health decisions, now is used to argue against masks. Politicians charge their opponents with immoral and unethical acts they themselves are committing, and their words are echoed enough that they take on their own reality. What are we to believe?

Klein asks: “Am I who I think I am or am I who others perceive me to be?”

Klein covers this mirror world through multiple iterations, including political protests, racism, eugenics, conspiracies, and political ideologies. She offers an intriguing analysis of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict written before the current war. The two sides are doppelgangers, she says. The same yet totally different. Which is the evil twin? Both and neither.

This is a complex, deeply researched and eye-opening view of our divided culture and how we got here. Klein concludes with a call to action and advises us to remain calm. Our current problems are hundreds of years in the making, she shows, and have flourished because of our sense of individualism, while our support of and reliance on community withers. The result is a tribal society in which we no longer trust members of other groups, our reflex being to disagree with them without listening to their very real concerns.

It’s a world in which conspiracy theorists like Wolf thrive until, perhaps, we use our words and call them what they are: weird.

This was nobody’s favorite book, including mine—and I recommended it. Some BBBers reread passages, trying to squeeze the meaning out of them; others skimmed entire sections, eyes crossing with mental fatigue; many never finished. Those who did finish agreed that the book’s final sections, Part Three and Part Four, are its strongest. And the Epilogue is well worth reading even if you skip the rest.

— Pat Prijatel

The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese

The Covenant of Water is a voluminous, voluptuous multigenerational family epic teeming with characters connected by water, genes, and community. It is set in Kerala, a lush region on India’s southwest coast of the Arabian Sea, land that becomes a character of its own.

At 736 pages, it is a commitment. The audiobook clocks in at 32 hours. Author Abraham Verghese’s family is from Kerala, but he was born in Ethiopia, of missionary parents. The story was inspired by his grandmother from Kerala.

The novel starts with Big Ammachi as a 12-year-old bride. She immediately becomes mother to Jojo, barely nine years younger. Her gentle, loving husband is never given a name in the book, but is called Big Appachen, or father. Their daughter, Baby Mol, stays a mental age of five but has the emotional range of a savant. Their son, Philopose, arrives with great promise but needs a village to help him find his way. He marries Elsie, a gifted artist, who gives birth to Baby Ninan and almost dies in childbirth with Miriamma.

Big Appachen’s family suffers from what they call The Condition, an ailment that leads to death by drowning at least once a generation, even in shallow water. The problem is exacerbated by Kerala’s geography—it’s laced with canals that largely provide transportation, especially in the early-to-mid 1900s, when most of the novel is set. Big Appachen has The Condition and therefore avoids water, even if it means walking for hours instead of taking a short boat ride. Philipose has it too, but he responds by insisting he can learn to swim. He’s stubborn, but he still can’t swim.

Big Ammachi, a devout St. Thomas Catholic, prays for a savior to find a cure for The Condition. Will it be the gentle Rune, a doctor from Sweden, who builds St. Bridget’s Leprosarium? Or Digby, who comes to India from Glasgow, with his surgeon’s skills and tendency to love women married to other men? Or will the answer come from closer to home? Verghese takes his time to give us the answer, luring us into multiple side journeys that educate and entertain, introducing a slew of characters so well developed we miss them when we finally finish the novel.

The book develops like water itself, building momentum through the years, as traditional medicine merges with Western and as both integrate with the community. Finding a treatment for The Condition means listening to the people, learning their history, using traditional techniques to understand the patient and the tools of modern medicine to define the disease and search for a cure.

It’s the kind of medicine Verghese teaches as a professor at Stanford Unversity, the kind that works with and for people.

Death is a profound part of the book, and Verghese uses it to show the necessity of truly living with and through family—biological or not. Trauma forges the people of the ovel; in loss they find love; in despair, they turn to goodness.

Verghese says the meaning of “covenant” in the title should remain a bit mysterious and, as in the rest of a novel, “the reader provides their imagination and somewhere in the middle spaces a mental movie takes shape.”

As the book unfolds, the covenant of water becomes a baptism, a rebirth, and an absolution. To coexist with the water, the Kerala community must respect its rhythms and barriers. They know water can heal, it can serve, it can kill, and it can keep secrets.

Verghese does a masterful job reading the audiobook, especially nailing the book’s many accents—Swedish, Scots, British, and varied Indians castes. He has special fun with one particular scene, in which a missionary from Body of Christ (Corpus Christi), Texas, a stand-in for Billy Graham, gives a bizarre sermon that is translated into a form nothing like the original by Uplift Master. (Uplift is one of the many characters named for his function in the community—he takes care of things and boosts morale.) The scene deserves to be listened to, read, and reread.

The book ends in the 1970s, a time of social progress and change. Women doctors are common, valued friends are no longer required to eat outside because of their caste, and medicine is at a crossroads. A new hospital is being built because the community—especially Uplift Master—envisioned, financed, and staffed it. Old ways of healing remain and, ideally, guide a new generation of doctors.

— Pat Prijatel

Note: This version of Pat’s review of The Covenant of Water was adapted from her original review published at Psychology Today: Storytelling as Medicine

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster, by Stephen L. Carter

This book presents the true story of Eunice Hunton Carter, one of the most famous and accomplished Black women of 1940s America. Although she’s no longer a household name, the author – her grandson, the novelist Stephen Carter – provides a detailed account of her fascinating life.

Eunice Hunton’s grandfather, Stanton Hunton, purchased his freedom from slavery before the Civil War. His son, William Alphaeus Hunton Sr., migrated to Atlanta and married Addie Waites Hunton. Both William and Addie were college educated and activists with the YMCA and NAACP. They had two children, Eunice and Alphaeus, and eventually they moved their family to Brooklyn, New York. Addie Hunton, Eunice’s mother, was relentless in her work in advancement and support of the “darker nation” (term used by the author), and she was clearly a role model to Eunice for choosing to pursue a non-traditional path despite both societal expectations and the seemingly insurmountable roadblocks of gender and race. Ultimately, Eunice became one of the first female African-American lawyers and one of the first African American prosecutors in the United States.

In 1921, Eunice graduated from Smith College with a degree in social work. After a few years of work in that field, she went back to school to study law. She became the first black woman to earn a law degree from Fordham University in New York City, and then in 1935, the first black woman assistant district attorney in the state of New York. After gaining some notoriety with her legal and political work, she was one of 20 lawyers selected by special prosecutor Thomas Dewey, who was on a mission to curtail the mafia in New York and in general. Although she was initially tasked on that team with listening to what were perceived to be lower-level morality crimes of prostitution, it was through that work that she identified ongoing patterns and connections that eventually led to the conviction of mafia boss Lucky Luciano in 1936. Her professional commitment to Dewey lasted through his presidential runs of 1944 and 1948.

Although she did not seem very interested in or suited for motherhood, she and her husband, Lisle Carter Sr., had a son named Lisle Carter Jr. He was the father of the author of this book, her grandson Stephen Carter.

Carter’s work in this book is a bit of an enigma. He is a well-known best-selling author of works such as The Emperor of Ocean Park, which was one of Time Magazine’s 100 best mystery and thriller books of all time. He is also a law professor at Yale Law School. But his presentation of this material is fairly dry and reads like an academic paper or a book report at times. With all the interesting facts and storyline he had to work with in his grandmother’s life, it’s odd that he wasn’t able to identify the mundane bits and condense them so that the interesting parts would have room to be more compelling. As it is, the reader has to get through a LOT of back-story about the lives of William and Addie – especially Addie – before getting to Eunice. One of our club members described the title as a bit of a bait and switch. That being said, the book also contains interesting glimpses of professional life in Harlem, and Alphaeus’s association with the Communist Party.

We found it unusual that the author didn’t personalize the story a bit more by saying, “my grandmother” or “my father,” but always Eunice and Lisle, etc. This was especially noticeable when he talked about Eunice sending Lisle away as a child and rarely visiting, a period of time that was very painful “for Lisle.” It was unclear whether this was an attempt to stay emotionally neutral while sweeping feelings under the rug or if he really feels distant from it. In any case, he clearly does admire the work that his grandparents did, even if their paths did not allow time for warm family bonds.

Overall, our group was glad that we read this book and became aware of the life and work of Eunice Hunton Carter. Her story is an inspiration and very deserving of documentation.

— Julie Feirer & Bill Smith