From a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and a former White House senior advisor, a deeply reported manual for how individuals can resist America’s slide away from democracy, based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world.
The United States has crossed into a new and unfamiliar realm—one in which daring to challenge the state carries real danger. Ordinary Americans now face a government that feels more like foreign autocracies, with a White House stretching the powers of the presidency beyond recognition. The sitting president wields fear as a weapon, punishes political enemies, intimidates sitting members of Congress, bends private businesses to his will, and disappears student protesters off the streets.
Based on their acclaimed The New Yorker essay “So You Want to Be a Dissident: A Practical Guide to Courage in Trump's Age of Fear,” Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and former White House senior advisor Ami Fields-Meyer deliver a guide to courage in America’s age of fear. On Courage is a captivating collection of stories and lessons from the front lines of the fight for the future of the free world that invite action and rouse hope.
Step into the room where the world’s new dissidents—ordinary people, in the U.S. and around the world, who never aspired to be activists—are writing the playbook for courage, risk, and resistance in the age of authoritarianism and unprecedented digital surveillance.
On Courage simplifies the calculus of activism by making more accessible than ever the fundamentals of taking political risk. It’s a handbook that is equal parts practical and spiritual, a valuable resource and a powerful message for anyone, anywhere, who feels the walls of history closing in on them.
About the Author :
Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist, a bestselling author, a New York Times contributing Opinion writer and founding director of the Independent Media + Audience Project at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. She is the founder of two nonprofit newsrooms – Proof News and The Markup – that investigate the impacts of technology. She is a winner and two time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (Times Books, 2014) and Stealing MySpace: The Battle to Control the Most Popular Website in America (Random House, March 2009).
Ami Fields-Meyer is a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and a former senior policy advisor at the White House, where he led U.S. policy initiatives related to civil rights, consumer protection, and technology policy. He has served as a strategist to national civil rights organizations, political candidates, and high-profile public officials from Los Angeles City Hall to the West Wing. Fields-Meyer’s writing on issues of democracy and public policy has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and other outlets. A former speechwriter, he is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Review :
“If there are books for moments in history this must certainly be one. It’s clear, practical and above all inspiring. It’s a counsel of hope. It shows how humble beginnings—a few people talking together—become the first seeds of radical social, spiritual and political change. Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny and Ece Temelkuran’s How to Lose a Country told us where we were heading. This extraordinary work tells us what we can do about it—how we, the people, can change things. It traces the history of successful social movements, and also tells us where things sometimes went wrong. When I find a book that seems really important I sometimes buy multiple copies so I can share them with friends. I want to buy hundreds of this one.” — Brian Eno
"Democracy rarely fails because people don’t know right from wrong. More often, it falters because those with power face hard moments alone—and choose safety over courage. Ami Fields-Meyer and Julia Angwin have written an essential guide that gives us the tools to stand up for what we believe in during the critical moments ahead." — Joyce Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Giving Up is Unforgivable
"In keeping with its title this book is itself an act of altruistic courage. Here is the practical, historically informed examination of dissent that our troubled moment calls for. We have, in recent years, witnessed violent insults to democracy, to the rule of law and to basic civic decency and asked 'What can we do?' One profoundly important answer to that question should be: 'Begin by reading On Courage.'" — Jelani Cobb
“For anyone who has ever wondered what they would have done in darker times in history—and who is now realizing they may not have to wonder much longer—On Courage is the book you need. It arrives at exactly the right moment: as we learn that the defense of our democracy begins not in the halls of power, but with each of us. This book will inspire you with the stories of those who have done this before–dissidents, organizers, and ordinary people who turned back authoritarian power–so we can walk in their footsteps. Read it. Then act.” — Ian Bassin, Co-Founder of Protect Democracy and MacArthur "Genius Grant" recipient
“On Courage is the book I wish I’d had when I made the decision to speak out. It’s a clear-eyed, deeply human manual for doing what’s right even amid profound personal risk. Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer have given us a gift: a powerful and practical testament to listening to the lonely inner voice that insists something is wrong—and discovering along the way that we were never truly alone.” — Miles Taylor, whistleblower and New York Times bestselling author of A Warning
At just the moment we need it most, Fields-Meyer and Angwin offer a brilliant roadmap for moral clarity and resolve in profoundly challenging times. On Courage is both a spiritual and practical toolkit and a stirring call to action. This book is a forceful, inspiring charge to take meaningful risks to confront injustice, and to do it together. Above all, it is a reminder: if we are to survive this storm, it will be because we find the courage to practice dissent. — Sharon Brous, national bestselling author of The Amen Effect and named the #1 most influential rabbi in America by Newsweek
