Is There a Right Way to Rebel?

What to Read

Find Your Next Book

Fantasy

Science Fiction

Thrillers

Romance

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.

Supported by

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Nonfiction

Is There a Right Way to Rebel?

In “How to Be a Dissident,” Gal Beckerman offers an inspiring tour of famous renegades with lessons for the rabble-rousers of today.

Share full article

Protesters participating in the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963.

Credit...

Bob Adelman

By

Astra Taylor

Astra Taylor is the co-author, with Naomi Klein, of the forthcoming “End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.”

April 18, 2026,

5:02 a.m. ET

Buy Book

▾

Amazon

Barnes & Noble

Books-A-Million

Bookshop.org

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

See more of our coverage in your search results.

Encuentra más de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de búsqueda.

Add The New York Times on Google

Agrega The New York Times en Google

HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT

, by Gal Beckerman

In the spring of 1963, in Birmingham, Ala., teenagers and children as young as six faced fire hoses, dogs and angry police officers to protest segregation. The campaign, called “Project C” — the “C” stood for “confrontation” — involved rolling marches and sit-ins. On a single day, hundreds of young people were locked up.

“Don’t worry about your children,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assured anxious parents. “Don’t hold them back if they want to go to jail, for they are doing a job for not only themselves but for all of America and for all mankind.” Less than a week later, the jailed kids were released and the city agreed to desegregate its lunch counters.

The so-called Children’s Crusade of 1963 is one of the many stories recounted in “How to Be a Dissident,” an inspiring series of profiles of activists and rabble rousers from Gal Beckerman, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review who is now a staff writer at The Atlantic, and whose previous works include a history of

radical ideas

and a history of

Soviet Jews

. Beckerman features the Birmingham tale prominently in a chapter titled “Be Reckless,” which also lingers on the example of the Russian opposition leader

Aleksei Navalny

, who refused to remain in exile after an almost-lethal poisoning in 2020 and died in a Russian prison four years later.

How to Be a Dissident

Save to

your reading list

:

Want to read

Have read

To his credit, Beckerman offers no hard and fast formula for determining when heroic risk-taking veers into irresponsible adventurism or outright self-destruction. Recklessness is both “necessary” and “completely fraught,” he writes.

Superficially, “How to Be a Dissident” takes the form of a guide, with each of the 10 chapters focused on a trait central to the dissident temperament: In addition to being reckless one should “Be Alone,” “Be Pessimistic,” “Be Watchful,” “Be Human” and so on. But the book can also be understood as one man’s reckoning with the existential questions posed by the rising tide of authoritarianism.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and

log into

your Times account, or

subscribe

for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?

Log in

.

Want all of The Times?

Subscribe

.

Related Content

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT