On Freedom

This isn't a history book - I've been familiar with prof. Snyder's other work and was expecting one, I guess.

It is an ethical treaty. A lament on the now unstoppable fall of the US imperial age. A look into how other empires fell and how countries can be - are - rebuilt afterwards, how actions and decisions shape the land and the people.

It is a book I needed to read, but which made me unbelievably sad every time I got to it.

I was worried that it would be a warmed over riff on Isaiah Berlin, but it's a bracingly serious & idiosyncratic work — equal parts history, political polemic, and personal essay — that melds Snyder's vocation as a historian and avocation as a public intellectual. You'll probably find something in there with which to disagree, which is perhaps the point.