Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale

Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Twilight of Democracy

The Failure of Politics and the Parting of Friends

by Anne Applebaum

Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.

Narrator Anne Applebaum

This audiobook uses AI narration.

We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.

Learn more

Length 5 hours 15 minutes

Language English

Add to Wish List

Almost ready!

In order to save audiobooks to your Wish List you must be signed in to your account.

Summary
About the author

Brought to you by Penguin.

In the years just before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, conservative politicians and intellectuals across Europe and America celebrated a great achievement, felt a common purpose and, very often, forged personal friendships. The euphoria quickly evaporated, the common purpose and centre ground gradually disappeared and eventually - as this book compellingly relates - the relationships soured too.

Anne Applebaum traces a familiar history in an unfamiliar way, looking at the trajectories of individuals caught up in the public events of the last three decades. When politics become polarized, which side do you back? If you are a journalist, an intellectual, a civic leader, how do you deal with the re-emergence of authoritarian or nationalist ideas in your country? When your leaders appropriate history, or pedal conspiracies, or eviscerate the media and the judiciary, do you go along with it?

Twilight of Democracy is a new kind of political writing, an essay that mixes the personal and the political and brings a fresh understanding to the dynamics of public life in Europe and America, both now and in the past.

© Anne Applebaum 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

History Politics & Economy Nonfiction

Anne Applebaum is the author of Gulag: A History, which won the Pulitzer Prize, of Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which won the Cundill Prize, of Red Famine: Stalin's War on Ukraine which won the Lionel Gelber and Duff Cooper prizes, and of the best-selling Twilight of Democracy. She is a columnist for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins University. She divides her time between Britain, Poland and the USA

Audiobook details

Author Anne Applebaum

Narrator Anne Applebaum

ISBN 9780241481820

Length 5 hours 15 minutes

Language English

Publisher Penguin Books Ltd

Publication date July 21, 2020

Edition Unabridged

Genres History, Politics & Economy & Nonfiction

Reviews

Applebaum's reflections on the anti-democratic pandemic sweeping our world offer an extraordinary mix of personal witness and dispassionate historical analysis.... It's unlikely that anyone will ever give us more sensitive or revealing insights on this question Heretics make the best writers. ... Applebaum can bring a candle into the darkness of the populist right ... her writing is an arsenal that stores the sharpest weapons to hand. Applebaum's progress ...has yielded an enviable supply of raw material for her narrative. She mines her sources doggedly....Twilight of Democracy is a rather penetrating work of ethnography Advancing her arguments with eloquence and personal testimony, Applebaum passionately decries the corrosion of liberal, open-society values in the last three decades. written with deep insight, experience and wisdom. Definitely a very important book for understanding our troubled times and the fragility of our democracies Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy is the most important non-fiction book of the year because it asks the most urgent question: why is the right wing in the West moving so far to the right? Why is it, at this point in history, so drawn to authoritarianism? Why has it given up on democracy?' this engrossing account ... is a political book; it is also intensely personal, and the more powerful for it. Applebaum, long an authority on the abuses of Communist and post-Communist Eastern Europe, in her new book Twilight of Democracy is unsparing in exposing the moral bankruptcy of Trumpian Republicanism. Her sharp pen is as persuasive as any in presenting the idea of the "west" as a morally serious project-and one whose loss we may come to mourn. A brilliant writer who sheds light on the most disturbing political phenomenon of our era: the rise of rightwing authoritarianism around the world... a cry of alarm and a call to arms.... We have been warned. readable, eloquent and passionate ... Applebaum knows what the enemy looks like from the inside, and how it thinks. This book may only be a start. We should cherish her. I think she has a lot more she can tell us. This richly informed book enlarges her account of the enormous peril in which the democracy we took so casually for granted now stands. Applebaum's book asks why conservatives in the West have so willingly embraced deceipt, corruption and authoritarianism. She has answers, too. From Brexit Britain and Donald Trump's America to the cynical politics of Poland and Hungary, she feels beset by a new chauvinist right that has no regard for rules, truth or institutions. Ms Applebaum evokes an acute sense of betrayal as people she trusted turn against her, quicker than she thought possible. Her personal story is a parable of what can happen to alliances in the absence of a common adversary, and when the hardships such enemies inflicted fade from memory. This is an illuminating political memoir about the break-up of the political tribe that won the Cold War. Equal parts memoir, reportage, and history, this sobering account of the roots and forms of today's authoritarianism, by one of its most accomplished observers, is meant as a warning to everyone. ... critically important for its muscular, oppositionist attack on the new right from within conservative ranks-and for the well-documented warning it embodies. The author's views are especially welcome because she is a deliberate thinker and astute observer rather than just the latest pundit or politico. In the spirit of Julien Benda, Hannah Arendt, and Theodor Adorno, Applebaum seeks to understand what makes the new right "more Bolshevik than Burkean."... A knowledgeable, rational, necessarily dark take on dark realities. Expand reviews

Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale