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Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
by Timothy Snyder
A "bracing" (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America's turn towards authoritarianism, from "a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present" (The New York Times)
The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.
On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (3/5/2026)
I just finished the short book by Timothy Snyder, ON TYRANNY. (Twenty lessons learned from the twentieth century.) It really gave me a lot to think about.
-Dotti_A
"Easily the most compelling volume among the early resistance literature... . A slim book that fits alongside your pocket Constitution and feels only slightly less vital... . Clarifying and unnerving... . A memorable work that is grounded in history yet imbued with the fierce urgency of what now." —The Washington Post
"As Timothy Snyder explains in his fine and frightening On Tyranny, a minority party now has near-total power and is therefore understandably frightened of awakening the actual will of the people." —The New Yorker
"Snyder is superbly positioned to bring historical thinking to bear on the current political scene... . These unpretentious words remind us that political resistance isn't a matter of action-movie heroics, but starts from a willingness to break from social expectations." —The New Republic
This information about On Tyranny was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Timothy Snyder holds the Temerty Chair in Modern European History at the Munk School, University of Toronto, and is a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books, which have been published in over forty languages, include Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, Our Malady, and On Freedom. His work has inspired poster campaigns and exhibitions, sculptures, a punk rock song, a rap song, a play, and an opera, and he has appeared in over fifty films and documentaries.
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