Latest List

Top Ten Books

If you needed any further proof that we live in dark times, look not further than the death/murder of Alexei Navalny in his remote Arctic prison. Meanwhile, half then world's population will be going to the polls in 2024, and based on results to date in Indonesia and El Salvador, which both gave sizable mandates to strong men, the outlook is bleak. While the results in Russia are a foregone conclusion, other countries appear to be on the cliff edge of a populist abyss, the United States among them. There are multiple reasons for the crisis facing western democracy, but not least among them is our troubling failure to learn from history. We may live in the information age, but people spend less time reading books than they do absorbed in social media where facts are disposable, and truth can be anything you want it to be. Books are our greatest defense against ignorance. To quote the great Fran Lebowitz: “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” To get you started we invited the journalist and LGBT activist, Masha Gessen, author of The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, among many other gooks, to put together a list of ten tomes that explore what it means to live in an authoritarian world.