Book Review: Through that lens, Klein looks deeply into the 'mirror world'

But if your doppelganger is forever spouting extreme views that range from the ridiculous to the outright offensive, well, that would be no fun at all. This is the predicament that Naomi Klein finds herself in, since her doppelganger is Naomi Wolf.

Apparently, sharing a first name and the label 'feminist' is enough to make two women interchangeable in the eyes of the doom-scrolling, trolling public.

The problem for Klein is that Wolf, the author of an influential feminist text of the 1990s, The Beauty Myth, is no longer a voice of the feminist left. Now she's the darling of the alt-right, promulgating the kind of conspiracy theories that once made a person laughable but now earn someone a huge following.

Klein is still a voice of progressive leftism and curious about the quirks of humankind.

It's this curiosity that leads us through the fascinating labyrinthine world of doubles in every conceivable form, revealing the deep-rooted human fear of stolen or split identity.

Through that lens, Klein looks deeply into the 'mirror world', populated with conspiracy theorists, which reflects a distorted, darker image of humanity.

The people who live there (from across the political spectrum) are so distracted by misunderstood or mythological dangers that they ignore or trivialise the actual -- perhaps solvable -- problems in the real-world.

Listening to the audiobook, read by the author with a calm but palpable passion for the subject, makes the well-researched, well-structured material more immediate, more powerful.

And while the content is intellectually rigorous, it is also highly personal and utterly engaging throughout.

The sad fact is that Doppelganger will preach to the choir, and the people who need to read it probably never will. The best we can hope for is that a few people will buy it thinking of the wrong Naomi and, by chance, be saved from the quagmire of the mirror world.