On Tyranny

Twenty lessons from the twentieth century, pocket-sized and urgent, the most-carried civic book of the era. Snyder distilled the hard-won knowledge of how free societies fall into short, concrete instructions a citizen can actually use: do not obey in advance, defend institutions, believe in truth. It is brief by design, meant to be read in an hour and kept in a pocket. A historian of catastrophe writing a field manual for avoiding the next one.

A historian of Central and Eastern Europe and the twentieth century's catastrophes, whose short books on the present have reached an enormous readership. On Tyranny distills twenty lessons from the century's collapses into a pocket-sized civic handbook. On Freedom, written partly in wartime Ukraine, makes the affirmative case for what freedom is and what sustains it. He writes history as instruction for citizens who would rather not repeat it.