On Tyranny Graphic Edition: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder (Book 2 Blog 1)

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The book that I chose for this time around was “On Tyranny Graphic Edition: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century” by Timothy Snyder. As I looked through the list of options we had for Book 2, there were two words that caught my eye: Graphic Edition. I consider myself to be a visual learner so I knew that this book would probably be the best one for me to read from the list. However, this wasn’t the sole reason why I chose the book. This led me to do more research on the book to see what it was really about. As I looked at different reviews of the book, I realized that the book was about totalitarian regimes and what we can learn from their dominance in the 20th century to apply in the future. This resonated with me as my parents were in Iran during the Iranian Revolution in the 1970s. This was when the Shah of Iran was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini and a dictatorship was formed in Iran. My parents were forced to flee the country and ended up moving to Los Angeles and never looked back. I felt like this book would shed further light on what could’ve been done differently in this scenario, and what we can learn from situations like these in the future. This is especially useful right now, as Russia has invaded Ukraine and Vladimir Putin looks to use his power to take advantage of this weaker country.

The book has taught me a lot so far about our history and how our society should learn from the past. One thing that I’ve learned from the book came from Snyder’s 11th lesson which is to “Investigate.” In this chapter, Snyder emphasized how being informed on certain situations and doing the necessary research is extremely important nowadays. There is so much information out there on TV, social media, and online articles that it can be easy to get caught up in the headlines. However, these outlets can all be very useful as they make it so easy to do research on any situation. As I stated before, the book is a graphic book so the text is accompanied by many different images. This makes it a relatively easy read, and I have flown by the book so far. However, the language isn’t the easiest to understand, so the pictures definitely help out. Also, the book is the “Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century,” so the book is broken down into 20 different points and each “chapter” expands on the point being discussed. This again makes the book easy to follow.  

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