Desert Island Discs: Archive: 2016-201826 Nov 2017

Naomi Klein

The writer and activist Naomi Klein reached an international audience with her first book, the best-selling No Logo, a rallying cry against the power of corporate brands and the replacement of traditional manufacturing jobs with sweatshop labour.

Since then, she's turned her intellectual ire on to even bigger terrain - the political and economic systems underpinning capitalism and climate change. The way to save the planet, she says, requires a radical rethink which will address what she calls the "unresolved tensions" between big business and over-consumption.

It's no surprise then that her fierce broadsides against the free market ideology have attracted plaudits and opprobrium in equal measure. But, coming from a family steeped in political activism, such polarized reactions come with the territory. Her grandparents were fervent Marxists and she was born in Canada to American activist parents who fled the US in protest against the Vietnam War. Her mother is a feminist filmmaker while her doctor father was heavily involved with the natural birth movement.

Growing up in the 1980s, she was a committed shopper and self-confessed "teeny bopper." But at 19 she experienced a dramatic political awakening - after that, she says, "you had to call yourself a feminist."

Presenter Kirsty Young Producer Paula McGinley.

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Episoder(126)

Nicola Adams

Kirsty Young's castaway is Nicola Adams. She made history when she won the first ever Olympic gold medal in women's boxing at London 2012, retaining it in Rio 2016. She is the first woman fighter to h...

20 Nov 201635min

Yotam Ottolenghi

Kirsty Young's castaway is the cookery writer and restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi. His food mixes the flavours of the Middle East and the Mediterranean and has been credited with changing the way many e...

18 Nov 201634min

Ali Smith

Ali Smith is a Scottish writer. Born in Inverness in 1962, the youngest of five children by seven years, she says, "I grew up completely alone but with all the comforts of knowing I had a cushioning f...

6 Nov 201634min

Michael Bublé

Kirsty Young's castaway is the singer, Michael Bublé. Born in Burnaby, British Columbia, as a young boy he spent hours listening to his grandfather's record collection which featured the stars of the ...

1 Nov 201634min

Jackie Kay

Kirsty Young's castaway is the poet and writer Jackie Kay. Born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, she was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Ka...

23 Okt 201636min

Dr Robert Langer

Kirsty Young's castaway is the scientist Dr Robert Langer. Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is the most cited engineer in history, and was awarded the prestigious U...

16 Okt 201634min

Stephen Hough

Kirsty Young's castaway is the concert pianist and composer Stephen Hough. He discovered he liked playing the piano when he went to visit his aunt's house and could pick out more than one hundred nurs...

9 Okt 201637min

Christiane Amanpour

Kirsty Young's castaway is the journalist and broadcaster Christiane Amanpour. Her career as a reporter was forged in some of the world's most hostile environments from Bosnia to Rwanda and Iraq to Is...

2 Okt 201633min