(This will be the first in a series of one-paragraph reviews on books or TV or films or CDs or whatever I have recently spent a couple minutes or hours with. I hope to get back to blogging…gradually. But given that blogging was a New Year’s resolution and today is now January 9, I advise the reader not to get his/her hopes up about a full return of M&P.)

I don’t remember how I first came across Naomi Klein’s No Logo – I think it happened while I was at Indigo, browsing the non-fiction table and then finding it referenced in an old article about Radiohead as something Thom Yorke had just read and gotten would up about. In any case, No Logo is a well-written and insightful bit of muckraking on how global brands have, in effect, taken over the world through a combination of brand-centered ad campaigns that pervade every corner of public space and business policies that alienate workers at home and in the third-world. The usual superbrand suspects (Wal-Mart, Nike, the Gap, Starbucks, McDonald’s … basically anything that had an outlet torched during the Seattle WTO riots in 2000, right after this book came out) are shamed, of course, but what makes Klein’s reporting provocative and not merely rabble-rousing is how she ties together various factors – branding, globalization, sweatshops, corporate mergers, logo-conscious consumerism, etc. – into a web of postmodern/late capitalist critique. I haven’t yet finished the last section (about a mass of people who are “taking aim at the brand bullies” in a way suggested by the book’s subtitle), but it seems that Klein is overstating popular resistance to globalized superbrands as a way to make the book a little less dreary and suggest that there is hope for the masses to reclaim this or that. Even if I try to imagine myself back in 1999, I have trouble thinking of how the “people” were fighting back in meaningful ways; it seems the superbrands have only become more powerful since then. Perhaps discussing the inexorable growth of systems of power (a la Foucault) or talking about consumer society’s interplay of objects and desires (a la Baudrillard) would have been too much of a downer for some. Or maybe I just prefer those kinds of pessimistic analyses from too many grad school seminars.