An Embarrassment of Tyrannies: Twenty-Five Years of Index on Censorship    
Edited by W. L. Webb and Rose Bell

August 17, 1998
Hardcover, 346 pages
9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches

ISBN-13: 978-0807614464
$15.95

Collected here are sixty-two powerful and often terrifying pieces selected from Index on Censorship's twenty-five years' worth of issues documenting and condemning tyranny. 

The writings, many by such renowned authors as Nadine Gordimer, Arthur Miller, and Julio Cortazar, cover the issues with careful even-handedness. Ariel Dorfman writes from the experience of the Chilean dictatorship and imagines a training course for salesmen of torture equipment; Alexander Solzhenitsyn has a fragment of poetry recalling his own period in a labor camp in Kazakhstan; Wale Soginka writes powerfully in defense of Salman Rushie—a truly disturbing piece. 

A great tribute to Index's achievements, this collection celebrates without being self-congratulatory. Its contributors provide elegant testimony to the human spirit's capacity for survival and its continuing struggle for freedom.

W. L. Webb is a journalist and political commentator, associated with Index on Censorship from its founding. He was formerly literary editor of The Guardian.

Rose Bell has been with Index since 1991 and is currently its Production Editor.