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63
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
75/100Critics
16/100Scholars
97/100Author:
Ruth Ben-Ghiat
Publisher:
W. W. Norton & Company
Date:
November 10, 2020
A history and Italian studies professor at New York University analyzes the blueprint authoritarian demagogues have followed over the past 100 years, offering readers tools to recognize, resist, and prevent their disastrous rule in the future.
What The Reviewers Say
Readers might expect that a book such as this would be a compendium of murder, mayhem, malfeasance, and misanthropic behavior, and they will not be disappointed in the fast-moving pages of this volume. But what they might not anticipate—and what separates this book from the many others that examine tyrants and tyranny—is the analysis that puts this phenomenon in perspective.
In [one] view, rather than a by-product of global and American racist, populist, and fascist traditions reformulated in postfascist anti-democratic ways, Trumpism can be easily bracketed and summarily dismissed.
For the reader inured by the drip-drip-drip of stories of brazen corruption over the course of years, it is bracing to see a half-decade’s worth of reporting so carefully distilled.
The author is at her best when describing the history of Mussolini’s rise, and the way that insouciant Italians and foreign powers facilitated it.
