Summary

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expresses her grave concerns about Donald Trump's anti-democratic tendencies; they remind her of the effects of Fascist authoritarianism that she experienced as a child. Her opening chapter describes how Fascism radically changed the direction of her own life. In March 1939 German stormtroopers invaded her native Czechoslovakia, forcing her family to flee to London, where they lived for the duration of the war. Their return to a free Czechoslovakia was short-lived, due to the Communist takeover in 1948, causing them to escape to the United States. She became a diplomat and university professor like her father with a specialty in Eastern Europe. Albright reminds readers that the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation created a postwar world of unceasing anxiety, “in which the lingering shadow of Fascism was darkened by another kind of cloud” (2). “Marx's dream of...