An Embarrassment of Tyrannies

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 labor camp in Kazakhstan; Wale Soginka writes powerfully in defense of Salman Rushie—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.