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Surviving Autocracy
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56/99
Critics' Rating Index
83/99
Readers' Rating Index
94/99
Scholars' Citation Index
94/99
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About This Book
A bestselling, National Book Award-winning journalist's essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Masha Gessen stood out from other journalists for the ability to convey the ominous significance of Donald Trump's speech and behavior, unprecedented in a national candidate. Within forty-eight hours of his victory, the essay "Autocracy: Rules for Survival" had gone viral, and Gessen's coverage of his norm-smashing presidency became essential reading for a citizenry struggling to wrap their heads around the unimaginable. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Gessen has a sixth sense for signs of autocracy--and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate its emergence to Americans. This incisive book provides an indispensable overview of the calamitous trajectory of the past few years. Gessen not only highlights the corrosion of the media, the judiciary, and the cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years have changed us, from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages but also a beacon to recovery--or to enduring, and resisting, an ongoing assault.
Reviews
"a polemic take rather than a work of balanced reportage – and that is part of the point."
"At times, I found myself swayed by Gessen's fear that everything is breaking his way, that even the things that appear to constrain his power—like his persistent incompetence—will somehow serve to deepen his hold on the American Republic and the American mind."
"one of the few analytical books to suggest plausible ways he might be stopped ..."
"What if Gessen had spent more time in the country these people feel they have lost?"
"Surviving Autocracy faces the problem that most anti-Trump books do: How to conclude in a way that strikes the right balance between realism and hope."
"[a] brisk, trenchant account ..."
"Many writers have chronicled the Trump administration's missteps and crimes, but few as concisely as Gessen, and her book belongs on the shelf alongside Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny and Amy Siskind's The List as a record of how far we have fallen."
"As a journalist, Gessen is inevitably preoccupied with the corruption of public discourse and particularly the rapid deterioration of the media's ability to hold American power to account."
"Gessen's is a clarion voice in the darkness, offering a sobering but sharp-witted analysis of how American society has changed under Trump and how democratic values and practices might yet survive."
"the manifest flaws in Trump's character and the danger his continued governance poses have been laid bare thanks to Gessen and other fearless journalists."
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