“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.
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“The fearless Russian American journalist probes the black hole between fact and fantasy in [a] taut, incisive critique.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine
“Offers discomfort and reassurance at once.”
— Washington Post“A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.”
— Interview“Gessen’s is a clarion voice in the darkness, offering a sobering but sharp-witted analysis.”
— Booklist (starred review)“A handbook…for our time, documenting the death of the old America while holding out slim hope for its restoration.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Masha Gessen is a Russian American journalist who is the author of several books, including the national bestseller The Man without a Face. Her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Newsweek, Slate, and many other publications, and has received numerous awards, most recently the 2013 Media for Liberty Award. She has served as the editor of several publications and as director of Radio Liberty’s Russia Service. She lives in Moscow.