Boston Book Festival 2018

History provides us with many examples of authoritarian leaders and tyrants. So does Shakespeare. This session looks at our present political circumstances with an assist from the past. The great Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblattt will talk about his latest work, Tyrant, and show how the Bard’s plays, from Richard III to Julius Caesar to Macbeth, mirror our own times. Yale historian Timothy Snyder has spent his career studying twentieth-century European history. His latest book, The Road to Unfreedom, shows in forensic detail that authoritarianism is on the rise again, that the driving force is Putin’s Russia, and that the fruits of Putin’s malign influence, including the presidency of Donald Trump, are being sown in western democracies, which are more fragile than we imagined. To illustrate the current authoritarian threat, Amy Siskind’s The List enumerates the Trump regime’s actions that pose a threat to our democratic norms, from his acceptance of white supremacists to his demonization of the press. Our moderator for this chilling and important conversation is Harvard’s Timothy Patrick McCarthy, Director of Culture Change and Social Justice Initiatives at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and author of the forthcoming Stonewall’s Children: Living Queer History in the Age of Liberation, Loss, and Love.