Since the mid-twentieth century, most people in Europe and North America have taken for granted the stability of their liberal democratic institutions. In the postwar decades, some democracies did collapse, but they tended to be weak states in poor countries outside the advanced Western world, such as Argentina, Brazil, Ghana, Peru, and Thailand. Today, as Levitsky and Ziblatt argue in this important study, democracies are dying in slower and more subtle ways—and Western dem

For nearly two decades, this manuscript lay hidden in a Chinese bank vault until a long-lost cousin from America inspired 92-year-old author Fengxian Chu to unearth it. ¨Song of Praise for a Flower¨ traces a century of Chinese history through the experiences of one woman and her family, from the dark years of World War II and China’s civil war to the tragic Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and beyond. It is a window into a faraway world, a sweeping epic about China’s