At last weekend's indie book crawl I picked up On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. Snyder, the Levin Professor of History at Yale University, is also the author of Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin , and Black Earth: the Holocaust as History and Warning . I noticed the book because as an artifact it's a delight. Roughly the size of two packs of playing cards set side by side, it has 126 pages, a Prologue, and 20 chapters, most ranging from 1 to 5 pages. The plain cover has that letter press feel. The typography is gorgeous. The premise of the book is that history can inform our lives. Snyder's deep knowledge of three periods - the rise of the USSR, the rise of Hitler, and the rise of Putin - provides a playbook for tyranny. It's clear that Snyder believes that our current president - whom he never names - is a sort of pre-tyrannical figure. What should we do about it? These are the 20 lessons: Do not obey in ad...