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.

Ben-Ghiat’s story...is at its heart a moral drama. The crucial factors at play are not social and political conditions but rather unscrupulous ambition and greed, on the one hand, and the determination (or the lack thereof) to resist it, on the other. This point of view is a provocative one. Unfortunately, like many in the alarm-bells camp, Ben-Ghiat tends to treat it as self-evidently true, and she therefore devotes far more attention to the strongmen’s own actions than to the factors that allowed them to rise and determined whether or not they succeeded. The problem, as her own book reveals, is that authoritarians do not simply prevail through violence: They seduce, they appeal, they exert charisma. And to understand why the seduction works, we cannot look at the strongmen alone; we also need to consider the people who fall under their spell.

Through extensive research in primary and secondary sources, Ben-Ghiat creates a sobering picture of how strong-willed men have been able to establish themselves as popular rulers, while undermining the very democratic structure within which they thrived. Ben-Ghiat's narrative is replete with examples of how authoritarian rulers came to power and how they maintain power; overall, the book represents a troubling portrayal of how mature modern democracies can be ultimately dominated by such strongmen.

This incisive study casts a wider geographic net than two recent books that have placed Trump on a continuum of authoritarian leaders.

... [an] incisive and richly detailed account.