"On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the twentieth century" by Timothy Snyder
Every once in a while there's a thin book appears before us that has an incredible wealth of information delivered in a concised manner, such as The Art of War, Book of Five Rings, The Richest Man in Babylon, even Who Moved My Cheese and One Minute Manager. This is one of those books.
This is a very straight forward book, written by a profesor of history from Yale who has written numerous books on the subject. It is as if Tim Snyder compiles the very essence of his books into 1 big summary.
The content of the book is exactly what the cover says it is: 20 chapters that consist of 20 lessons from the 20th century, which covers World War 1, World War 2 and the Cold War, with great emphasis placed on what Hitler and Stalin did.
These lessons then being compared with the current affairs of the 21st century, and show that they all have a striking resemblance. For example, what Hitler did with the Reichstag, Putin also did with Chechnya, and I might add George W Bush did with 9/11 and Erdogan did with the attempted coup on 2016. Whether they're the mastermind behind it or not is besides the point, what's important is what they did after as a reaction.
Indeed, the theories in the book can give us a much bigger understanding on the world we live in now, and all of that enlightments I can read it in less than half a day, on a busy day. Highly recommended!
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