In response to right-wing extremism in the United States and around the world, Ken McGoogan offers lessons from history by looking back at the rise of authoritarianism and the collapse of European democracies in the lead-up to World War II.

In Shadows of Tyranny, historian Ken McGoogan warns against the future by drawing on the past, setting the emergence of alt-right fascism in the US against what happened last century in Europe. Incorporating conventional history, political analysis, biographical sketches and literary criticism--referencing visionary works by Margaret Atwood, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis and Philip Roth--Shadows of Tyranny honors those who defied dictatorship and exposed totalitarianism in all its guises.

McGoogan traces the ways democracy succumbed to paranoia, polarization, scapegoating and demagoguery less than a hundred years ago in the days of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini. Taking a biographical approach to history, he highlights the personal stories of those individuals who fought their way through the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. He looks at what the authors, journalists and poets of the day were writing, who was listening, and who wasn't.

The book tracks George Orwell, of course, but also journalists like Matthew Halton, Dorothy Thompson and Martha Gellhorn, philosophers like Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt, and such multi-faceted figures as Winston Churchill, Andre Malraux, Norman Bethune and William Stephenson. It follows them from the obliviousness of the 1920s through the stunned awakening of the 1930s, and on into the nightmare horror of the 1940s. McGoogan spotlights heroes of the French Resistance, such as Josephine Baker and Marie Madeleine Fourcade, before shifting the focus to reveal startling similarities between those events of the past and the trajectory of American politics under leaders like McCarthy and Trump.

Shadows of Tyranny aims to revive the words of Winston Churchill when he said, Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Twentieth-century novels such as George Orwell's 1984 and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale produced visions of future dystopia that rang with echoes of past tyrannies. Always implied was a warning that history's worst chapters are never truly closed, and that we must not fail--as many of our forebears did--to recognize that the threat of totalitarianism cannot simply be wished away.

Arctic historian Ken McGoogan approaches the legacy of nineteenth-century explorer Sir John Franklin from a contemporary perspective and offers a surprising new explanation of an enduring Northern mystery.

Two of Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin's expeditions were monumental failures--the last one leading to more than a hundred deaths, including his own. Yet many still see the Royal Navy man as a heroic figure who sacrificed himself to discover the Northwest Passage.

This book, McGoogan's sixth about Arctic exploration, challenges that vision. It rejects old orthodoxies, incorporates the latest discoveries, and interweaves two main narratives. The first treats the Royal Navy's Arctic Overland Expedition of 1819, a harbinger-misadventure during which Franklin rejected the advice of Dene and Métis leaders and lost eleven of his twenty-one men to exhaustion, starvation and murder. The second discovers a startling new answer to that greatest of Arctic mysteries: what was the root cause of the catastrophe that engulfed Franklin's last expedition?

The well-preserved wrecks of Erebus and Terror--located in 2014 and 2016--promise to yield more clues about what cost the lives of the expedition members, some of whom were reduced to cannibalism. Contemporary researchers, rejecting theories of lead poisoning and botulism, continue to seek conclusive evidence both underwater and on land.

Drawing on his own research and Inuit oral accounts, McGoogan teases out many intriguing aspects of Franklin's expeditions, including the explorer's lethal hubris in ignoring the expert advice of the Dene leader Akaitcho. Franklin disappeared into the Arctic in 1845, yet people remain fascinated with his final doomed voyage: what happened? McGoogan will captivate readers with his first-hand account of travelling to relevant locations, visiting the graves of dead sailors and experiencing the Arctic--one of the most dramatic and challenging landscapes on the planet.

In the mid-1800s, geographers revived the ancient idea that at the top of the world, encircling the North Pole, lay a temperate Open Polar Sea. Without doubt, the voyager who discovered this balmy basin would etch his name forever in the annals of exploration. Among those drawn to the challenge was Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, a handsome, charismatic figure from a leading Philadelphia family who was already a well-known adventurer and explorer. In 1853, Kane sailed to the Arctic to seek both the Open Polar Sea and the lost British explorer John Franklin. After sailing farther north than anyone yet, Kane and his men became trapped in the ice. Besides treacherous icebergs and violent currents, Kane battled starvation, disease, and a near mutiny before abandoning ship to lead a desperate escape in sleds and small boats. Race to the Polar Sea tells this story in heart-pounding detail. Drawing on documents never before seen, author Ken McGoogan brings to life a heroic figure famous in his day as America's greatest explorer and celebrates a shining example of American courage and survival.

The true story of the remarkable John Rae - Arctic traveller and Hudson's Bay Company doctor - FATAL PASSAGE is a tale of imperial ambition and high adventure. In 1854 Rae solved the two great Arctic mysteries: the fate of the doomed Franklin expedition and the location of the last navigable link in the Northwest Passage.

But Rae was to be denied the recognition he so richly deserved. On returning to London, he faced a campaign of denial and vilification led by two of the most powerful people in Victorian England: Lady Jane Franklin, the widow of the lost Sir John, and Charles Dickens, the most influential writer of the age. A remarkable story of courage and determination, FATAL PASSAGE is Ken McGoogan's passionate redemption of Rae's rightful place in history. In this richly documented and illustrated work, McGoogan captures the essence of one man's indomitable spirit.