Heads up for Shadows of Tyranny
Cover reveal! Coming from Douglas & McIntyre. Release date: August 24. Now available for pre-order. The overview reads something like this:
Twentieth-century novels such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale conveyed visions of dystopia that evolved out of past tyrannies. They warned that if history doesn’t repeat itself, certainly it extrapolates and often it rhymes. In Shadows of Tyranny, an audacious work of nonfiction, acclaimed author Ken McGoogan shows how the current resurgence of authoritarianism in the United States recalls Europe in the 1930s.
In Nazi Germany, a charismatic demagogue contrived to unify right-wing extremists bent on seizing control of the state. The most powerful nation in Europe ran amok, invading and occupying its neighbors. Defenders of democracy had to contend not just with Hitler but with Franco, Mussolini, and Stalin, who together defined the First Age of Dictatorship. Today we have entered the Second Age. With tyrants ruling Russia, China, and North Korea, among other countries, Donald Trump has never met an autocrat he did not admire.
In the 1930s, many welcomed the dictators, resorted to scapegoating, and fanned embers of anti-Semitism into a conflagration. Shadows of Tyranny celebrates those who fought the racist wildfire – soldiers, of course, but also novelists like Orwell and Sinclair Lewis, journalists like Matthew Halton, Dorothy Thompson, and Martha Gellhorn, and singular figures like Hannah Arendt, Norman Bethune, and Winston Churchill.
McGoogan takes a biographical approach to history, creating a montage of individual experience while inviting readers to engage in discovering an overarching narrative. He melds conventional history, political analysis, and literary observation into a genre-busting work of “cautionary nonfiction.”
Pre-order: Independent bookstores
