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A review by historyofjess
On Tyranny: Expanded Audio Edition by Timothy Snyder
informative
3.5
I feel like a lot of these books messages have made it into the mainstream in the last eight years to where it's not nearly as revelatory as it would have been had I read it back then.
A lot of the lessons are useful, but it's also good to recognize and acknowledge that Snyder is approaching this as a white, cis, man who's spent a lot of time in academia. This is particularly noteworthy when, in talking about propaganda and news sources, he gets into a weird print vs. screen tangent in which print is always good and screen is always bad. This is such a foolishly reductive argument that he fails to really grasp the nuances of. (E.g., I was literally listening to this audiobook on a screened device in my bed as he was telling me I shouldn't have screens in my bedroom and should chuck them for books.) Lots of misinformation assholes have written books. Not all books are good, sir. Not all information on screens is bad. This is just dumb.
And, as for the extended edition material, I tapped out early on it (I would've checked out the shorter version from my library to avoid it entirely, but they only had the extended edition). The whole pitch of On Tyranny was that it was a lean and mean approach to battling authoritarianism, so it's very strange to me to increase the runtime of the audiobook five times over. By Snyder's own admission, this added content isn't scripted, it's just him talking about the history of Russia and Ukraine in light of the war and loosely tying it to the bones of the initial text of On Tyranny. If this sounds interesting to you, have at it, but for me, it's not why I came to this book and, much like the initial text, I've learned a lot about the history of Ukraine and Russia in the last three years that I didn't really feel I was benefiting from an off-the-cuff lecture about it.
A lot of the lessons are useful, but it's also good to recognize and acknowledge that Snyder is approaching this as a white, cis, man who's spent a lot of time in academia. This is particularly noteworthy when, in talking about propaganda and news sources, he gets into a weird print vs. screen tangent in which print is always good and screen is always bad. This is such a foolishly reductive argument that he fails to really grasp the nuances of. (E.g., I was literally listening to this audiobook on a screened device in my bed as he was telling me I shouldn't have screens in my bedroom and should chuck them for books.) Lots of misinformation assholes have written books. Not all books are good, sir. Not all information on screens is bad. This is just dumb.
And, as for the extended edition material, I tapped out early on it (I would've checked out the shorter version from my library to avoid it entirely, but they only had the extended edition). The whole pitch of On Tyranny was that it was a lean and mean approach to battling authoritarianism, so it's very strange to me to increase the runtime of the audiobook five times over. By Snyder's own admission, this added content isn't scripted, it's just him talking about the history of Russia and Ukraine in light of the war and loosely tying it to the bones of the initial text of On Tyranny. If this sounds interesting to you, have at it, but for me, it's not why I came to this book and, much like the initial text, I've learned a lot about the history of Ukraine and Russia in the last three years that I didn't really feel I was benefiting from an off-the-cuff lecture about it.