What an eye opening book about dictatorship. A combination of history and facts that explain the rise and fall of dictators in an enlightening way. This book was simultaneous interesting and scary. It would make an excellent textbook or classroom discussion about governments, dictators, and the scenarios around their rise and fall. The narrator transcends time and floats in and around the stories. He is both newscaster and narrator that readers wonder if he will become a dictator himself. Overall, a solid book for collections and classrooms.

Are you a fan of personal freedom? Would you like a primer for what it looks like when your freedoms are eroded? The dictators profiled in this book are from the world's recent history and while it's super depressing, the authors somehow make it seem funny in a lot of ways. I'm adding it to my high school civics booklist.

I wanted to love this - the art style is stunning - but the target audience seems to be people who already have a solid understanding of all things government, perhaps as a read for a college-level government course. It isn’t really something that can be consumed by the masses, and I was instantly overwhelmed by wading through what it was trying to say. Not a bad book at all, just not what I thought I was getting.

My thanks to both NetGalley and the publisher First Second Books for an advanced copy of this graphic novel about how easy it is to lose something that many people don't understand, and how our inactivity is allowing creeps, cretins, abusers and/or plain old grifters to destroy everything we hold dear. 

The question that goes thorough my mind most often living in America is are people just lazy or are they as dumb as the politics they expound. Or as so many are learning is all just a grift, feign outrage, ask for money, make profit to paraphrase South Park's gnome characters. Add to that a media who seems not to understand that ratings does not always mean good things, publishers who give book deal to book burners, well not yet, book banners, and one gets a sense that failure is just right around the corner. I'm sure the comments here will all be brilliant phrases that Edmund Burke, Thomas Jefferson and Walter Bagehot would go, I wish I had thought of that. And that is exactly what those who want to control everything want. Uncertainty, nastiness, and an untrusting electorate. Real problems will never be solved, is everyday some fake outrage is brought up, time wasting on bathrooms, or Disney movies, while the world gets hotter, and rights slowly erode. Everything I have stated is laid out quite clearly in the remarkable graphic novel, Dictatorship: It's Easier Than You Think! by journalist and podcaster Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa, with art by Kasia Babis. This is a guide to how to fool some of the people all of the time, and confuse them so much with hyped up rage, that no one ever looks at the man behind the curtain. And by the time anyone does, it is much too late. 

The book is basically a guide to ruining the world. How the people go from It can't happen here, to let it happen here, so we can be great again. There are plenty of examples, from here and around the world, all laid out and footnoted. What is interesting is even with the added technology the playbook is still the same. Accuse, deny, destroy the ways of getting real information, lie, and repeat. Deny the truth, and keep defying with the loudness of voice, and simplest of messages. Always have an enemy, something easy to blame everything on. Having a willing media, especially in this time of media conglomerates who look at the stock price, more than doing anything for the people. And to those reporters who still do their jobs, demean them, set lackeys on them, accuse them of bias, or not telling both sides. 

The graphic novel is depressing in the fact that this is not new, but to a country that has no sense of its own history or wants to do their own research, research which always seem to agree with what they feel, well it makes sense. That and the fact that humans hate to be wrong. And will bring down a country to not ever have to admit it they were fooled. This is a hard book in that it is true in so many ways. And for that reason I am sure it will be banned in most states. 

I don't envy the writers and their comments that I m sure that will follow here or online. I am sure they will be attacked for being anti-American, Communists, socialists, Northerners, Yankee Fans, whatever the insult du jour is this week. This is a big book, and might scare some people, but it is an important book, and one that really should be discussed, and shared. If anything it is great to see some people give a darn where this country is going.

Clumsy intro and garish artwork make this an unappealing read. Bonus star in recognition of the importance of the subject matter.

When a graphic novel takes four days to read and has 20 pages of citations at the end, you know something special is happening. Part love letter to Hannah Arendt and part huge warning, this book leans into the argument, “it isn’t a how to.”  Satire works best when facing the truth.  Thanks to Net Galley and First Second books for the ARC. Wow.

This was objectively terrible. I couldn't get past the first chapter. I was hoping for better from her since her Twitter makes me laugh fairly often.