What do Milton Friedman, Augusto Pinochet, and Iraq have in common? Naomi Klein offers a defiantly partisan deconstruction of Friedman's Chicago School of economics and its open embrace of natural and manmade crises (e.g., Hurricane Katrina, coups in Chile and other South American countries in the '70s and '80s, Russia's communist implosion in the '90s, the U.S. occupation of Iraq) as key opportunities for its accolytes to swoop in, jolt a dazed populace with free market shock therapy, and quickly consolidate power while crushing dissent. If her reach seems sometimes to exceed her grasp -- she finds the electrical torture devices used by the juntas advised by Friedman's "Chicago Boys" a natural outgrowth of the advisers' economic shock doctrine -- she succeeds in showing how, in the age of globalization, free market precepts are being appropriated to build corporatist oligarchies that ride roughshod over our most cherished democratic ideals.