I'll post a full review closer to the publication date of October 5, 2021. For now, let me just say that Krug (winner of the National Book Critics Circle autobiography award for her visual memoir Belonging) has done an astonishing job of embellishing Snyder's stark, prescient text. Each page is entirely different, and each at once (suitably) disquieting and beautiful; the result is an edition that feels at once utterly surprising and completely, perfectly inevitable.
You can see a handful of its images on Amazon (you can also pre-order it on bookshop.org) though they give barely a hint of the richness of the edition as a whole. (The cover art, for what it's worth, is to my mind slightly misleading, suggesting a more brutal and less colorful graphic vision than is actually found inside.)
In addition to being a powerful text on how societies slide into tyranny and what we can do to resist that, the graphic edition is a powerful exemplar of the power of word/image combinations. The hardcover edition appears from Ten Speed Press on October 5, 2021.
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| From On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder, illustrated by Nora Krug |