Friday, July 23, 2021

Embarrassing tyrannies

 



Mint condition. PB. 346pp. $25 including postage anywhere in Australia.

Collected here are sixty-two powerful and often terrifying pieces selected from Index on Censorship's twenty-five years' worth of issues documenting and condemning tyranny.

The writings, many by such renowned authors as Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, and Julio Cortazar, cover the issues with careful even-handedness. Ariel Dorfman writes from the experience of the Chilean dictatorship and imagines a training course for salesmen of torture equipment; Alexander Solzhenitsyn has a fragment of poetry recalling his own period in a labour camp in Kazakhstan; Wale Soginka writes powerfully in defense of Salman Rushdie―a truly disturbing piece.

A great tribute to Index's achievements, this collection celebrates without being self-congratulatory. Its contributors provide elegant testimony to the human spirit's capacity for survival and its continuing struggle for freedom.

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