It Can’t Happen Here is a warning on the frailty of democracy and a terrifying, unsettlingly ageless look at how fascism could take root in America. It is the only one of Sinclair Lewis’s later books to match the force of Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. It juxtaposes scathing political satire with the terrifyingly realistic ascension of a President who becomes a tyrant to “rescue the nation” since it was written during the Great Depression when America was mainly unaware of Hitler’s aggression. It Can’t Happen Here, which is at last back in print, continues to be a particularly significant work of fiction and is as current and fresh as the news today.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.”
“He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.”
“It isn’t what you earn but how spend it that fixes your class.”
“So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.”
“NOW is a fact that cannot be dodged.”
Niccol Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat, and political theorist, wrote The Prince in the 16th century as a manual for aspiring princes and kings. Machiavelli emphasises the value of allying with the helpless and putting a stop to anyone who might grow strong enough to revolt when ruling a mixed principality. A prince would need to be extremely foresighted to pull this out. Before they become too obvious, he must spot issues and evils, and he must act quickly to eliminate them.
Lords, strong men, and assistants all require close supervision. As stated earlier, everyone who has the strength or ambition to start a rebellion must be put down. A prince will have been chosen to lead a new principality either by good fortune, bad fortune, or both. It is forceful to assume authority by virtue. A prince needs to establish himself as a leader as soon as possible.
When a prince gains power through luck or through the efforts of others, he is in a risky situation because people can start to doubt his authority. He must therefore act swiftly to engender love and fear in the populace. Machiavelli does not denounce using evil to gain control. Instead, he advises carrying out immoral deeds swiftly and all at once. A prince must also devise strategies for permanently enslaving the populace.
According to Machiavelli, a principality’s military power is a good indicator of its might. A principality must always be armed to the teeth and capable of defending itself. A mercenary’s primary motivation is money, hence they shouldn’t be trusted.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
“If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.”
“The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.”
“There is no other way to guard yourself against flattery than by making men understand that telling you the truth will not offend you.”
“Never attempt to win by force what can be won by deception.”
Animal Farm, a satirical allegorical novella by George Orwell about a farm, was first released in England on August 17, 1945. It depicts the tale of a band of farm animals who rise up to confront their man farmer in an effort to establish an animal-friendly society.
Animals that have been abused and overworked on a farm take over. They went out to construct a paradise of advancement, fairness, and equality with fiery idealism and passionate slogans. The setting is therefore set for one of the most incisive satiric tales ever written—a sharp-edged fairy tale for adults that charts the progression from the revolt against oppression to totalitarianism that is just as dreadful. As Animal Farm was initially published, it was thought to be directed toward Stalinist Russia. Today, it is glaringly obvious that George Orwell’s masterpiece has a meaning and a message that are still fiercely relevant wherever and whenever liberty is attacked, regardless of the cause.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a unique masterpiece that ranks among the 20th century’s most influential books; as its dystopian purgatory becomes more real, it gets more menacing. The dystopian social science fiction book Nineteen Eighty-Four by English author George Orwell serves as a warning. It was Orwell’s ninth and last book that he finished during his lifetime, and Secker & Warburg released it on June 8, 1949.
The 1949 publication of the book features political satirist George Orwell’s terrifying portrayal of a totalitarian, bureaucratic world and one poor stiff’s quest for identity. The novel’s genius lies in Orwell’s prescience of contemporary life—the pervasiveness of television, the linguistic distortion—and his capacity to provide such an in-depth depiction of hell. It has been compulsory reading for students from the moment it was published and is one of the scariest books ever.
A true-life political thriller about a wealthy American investor in Russia’s Wild East, the death of his upright young tax attorney, and his perilous mission to reveal the corruption in the Kremlin. The path of Bill Browder began in the South Side of Chicago and continued through Stanford Business School to the cutthroat 1990s world of hedge fund investment. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it proceeded in Moscow, where Browder made a fortune as the manager of the biggest investment fund in Russia. However, once he exposed the dishonest oligarchs plundering the businesses which he was financing, Vladimir Putin turned against him and ordered his expulsion from Russia in 2005.
Browder’s offices in Moscow were searched by law authorities in 2007, and $230 million in taxes that his fund’s firms had paid to the Russian government were taken. Sergei Magnitsky, the attorney for Browder, looked into the incident and found a vast criminal business. Sergei was detained and tortured for a year in pre-trial detention after testifying against the involved officials for a month. On November 16, 2009, eight guards wearing full riot gear beat him to death in an isolation chamber after handcuffing him to a bed rail.
When Browder caught sight of the core of evil, it completely changed his life. He started a relentless search for justice in Sergei’s honor and exposed the massive cover-up that goes all the way to Putin.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Seventy years of communism had destroyed the work ethic of an entire nation. Millions of Russians had been sent to the gulags for showing the slightest hint of personal initiative. The Soviets severely penalized independent thinkers, so the natural self-preservation reaction was to do as little as possible and hope that nobody would notice you.”
“The less people know about how sausages and laws are made, the better they sleep at night.”
“Russian stories never have happy endings.”
“If I’m killed, you will know who did it. When my enemies read this book, they will know that you know.”
“For the previous few years, Putin had sat comfortably in the Kremlin, knowing that whatever happened in the US Congress, President Obama opposed the Magnitsky Act. In Putin’s totalitarian mind, this was an ironclad guarantee that it would never become law. But what Putin overlooked was that the United States was not Russia.”
The author of Space Invaders has written an intriguing, incantatory book about the legacy of historical crimes. In the midst of the Pinochet dictatorship, it is 1984 in Chile. A reporter who works for a dissident magazine encounters a member of the secret police and captures his statement. The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández has a compelling and horrifying narrator who first sees this man’s face on the cover of a magazine with the words “I Tortured People” when she is a young girl. The narrator’s involvement in the darkest crimes of the regime and his dedication to speaking about them follow her into adulthood and throughout her career as a writer and documentary filmmaker.
Like a secret service agent from the future, Fernández uses extraordinary feats of imagination to follow the “man who tortured people” into dark corners of history where Yuri Gagarin, chess games, morning routines, and the eponymous TV program from the title of the book coexist with the brutal yet routine schemes of the regime.
How do crimes that are obvious disappear? How does one fight against an oppressive system? Who decides how the realities we adhere to and take for granted are to be shaped? The Twilight Zone draws us into the shadowy portals of the past and serves as a constant reminder that, in the face of historical erasure, the writer’s task is to conceive deeply enough to make these gaps temporarily magnificently lit.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“Empathy and compassion are traits of lucidity, the possibility of putting oneself in another’s shoes, of transmuting the skin and masking oneself with a foreign face is an exercise in pure intelligence.”
“It was lost as memories are lost in memory.”
“Being stupid is a personal choice and you don’t necessarily have to wear a uniform to exercise that evil talent.”
“It doesn’t matter what you see, it matters what you think you see.”
“Or better, a piece of outer space in which they shipwrecked lost, like astronauts without connection, all these faces that were swallowed by an unknown dimension.”
French novelist Albert Camus wrote a novella in 1942 titled The Stranger, which was also released in English as The Outsider. Although Camus expressly disliked the term “existentialism,” its theme and attitude are sometimes regarded as instances of his philosophy, absurdism combined with existentialism.
Camus investigated what he called “the nudeness of man confronted with the ludicrous” through the tale of a regular man who unknowingly becomes involved in a senseless killing on a beach in Algeria. Published for the first time in English in 1946; a new translation by Matthew Ward.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.”
“I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.”
“Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter.”
“I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.”
Yann Martel wrote the fantasy adventure book Life of Pi, which was released in 2001. Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, the main character and a Tamil child from Pondicherry, begins to investigate moral and practical questions at a young age. After being stuck on a ship in the Pacific Ocean for 227 days following a shipwreck, he makes it alive alongside Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger.
Best Quotes from this Book:
“It is true that those we meet can change us, sometimes so profoundly that we are not the same afterwards, even unto our names.”
“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
“When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.”
“You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.”
“I challenge anyone to understand Islam, its spirit, and not to love it. It is a beautiful religion of brotherhood and devotion.”