Download or read book My Favourite Dictators written by Chris Mikul and published by SCB Distributors. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “I’m personally against seeing my pictures and statues in the streets, but it’s what the people want.” — Saparmurat Niyazov, dictator of Turkmenistan Dictators may be among the worst people in history, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t laugh at them. In My Favourite Dictators, Chris Mikul tells the stories of eleven of the twentieth century’s most colourful and reviled human beings, including Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il. In each case, he examines the political backgrounds to their rise to power and eventual downfall, but the focus here is on the personalities, peculiarities and private lives of these very strange men. You’ll be amazed and appalled by their effortless cruelties, voracious sexual appetites, absurd personality cults, ostentatious uniforms, promotion of dreadful art and pretensions to being great writers – not to mention their terrible taste in interior decoration.
Download or read book How to Be a Dictator written by Frank Dikötter and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-11-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Samuel Johnson Prize-winning author of China After Mao, a sweeping and timely study of twentieth century dictators and the development of the modern cult of personality.
Download or read book Defeating Dictators written by George B.N. Ayittey and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite billions of dollars of aid and the best efforts of the international community to improve economies and bolster democracy across Africa, violent dictatorships persist. As a result, millions have died, economies are in shambles, and whole states are on the brink of collapse. Political observers and policymakers are starting to believe that economic aid is not the key to saving Africa. So what does the continent need to do to throw off the shackles of militant rule? African policy expert George Ayittey argues that before Africa can prosper, she must be free. Taking a hard look at the fight against dictatorships around the world, from Ukraine's orange revolution in 2004 to Iran's Green Revolution last year, he examines what strategies worked in the struggle to establish democracy through revolution. Ayittey also offers strategies for the West to help Africa in her quest for freedom, including smarter sanctions and establishing fellowships for African students.
Download or read book Dictators Dinners written by Victoria Clark and published by . This book was released on 2020-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did dictators eat? Sometimes simply obscene amounts of the best their nations could offer, but more often their humble origins, or embarrassing medical conditions, or simple lack of interest in food meant their tastes were unpretentious--ranging from human flesh, to raw garlic salad, to Quality Street. Here we learn of their foibles, their eccentricities and their frequent terror of poisoning--something no number of food tasters was ever able to assuage. For a selection of 25 former national figureheads across the world, each section comprises an outline of the dictator's history, a short essay on their particular eating habits, table manners, digestive systems etc. and one or two of their favorite recipes.
Download or read book Dictator Style written by Peter York and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2006-05-04 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published: Great Britain: Atlantic Books, 2005.
Download or read book Dictator Literature written by Daniel Kalder and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-04-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Book of the Year for The Times and the Sunday Times ‘The writer is the engineer of the human soul,’ claimed Stalin. Although one wonders how many found nourishment in Turkmenbashi’s Book of the Soul (once required reading for driving tests in Turkmenistan), not to mention Stalin’s own poetry. Certainly, to be considered great, a dictator must write, and write a lot. Mao had his Little Red Book, Mussolini and Saddam Hussein their romance novels, Kim Jong-il his treatise on the art of film, Hitler his hate-filled tracts. What do these texts reveal about their authors, the worst people imaginable? And how did they shape twentieth-century history? To find out, Daniel Kalder read them all – the badly written and the astonishingly badly written – so that you don’t have to. This is the untold history of books so terrible they should have been crimes.
Download or read book Stalin s Library written by Geoffrey Roberts and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography as well as an intellectual portrait, this book explores all aspects of Stalin's tumultuous life and politics, told through his personal library. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs
Download or read book Dictators Homes written by Peter York and published by Atlantic. This book was released on 2006 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If our homes are an extension of our personalities then the interiors in Dictators' Homes provide evidence to substantiate the theory that these men and women were the world's most terrifying rulers. Featuring rare, jaw-dropping photographs of interiors that are now mostly (thankfully) destroyed, Peter York places each lair in its historical context leaving no tiger pelt unturned. From Saddam Hussein's private artwork and General Noriega's Christmas tree to the alarming tube and knob contraption in Ceausescu's en-suite bathroom no design detail is unexamined. The worlds' most famous Dictators are here. From Mussolini and Mobutu via Idi Amin, Lenin and Tito this book ensures that Dictators' crimes against good taste will no longer go unpunished.
Download or read book Hitler s Private Library written by Timothy W. Ryback and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-10-21 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Notable Book With a new chapter on eugenicist Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race In this brilliant and original exploration of some of the formative influences in Adolf Hitler’s life, Timothy Ryback examines the books that shaped the man and his thinking. Hitler was better known for burning books than collecting them but, as Ryback vividly shows us, books were Hitler’s constant companions throughout his life. They accompanied him from his years as a frontline corporal during the First World War to his final days before his suicide in Berlin. With remarkable attention to detail, Ryback examines the surviving volumes from Hitler’s private book collection, revealing the ideas and obsessions that occupied Hitler in his most private hours and the consequences they had for our world. A feat of scholarly detective work, and a captivating biographical portrait, Hitler’s Private Library is one of the most intimate and chilling works on Hitler yet written.
Download or read book Mussolini s Italy written by R. J. B. Bosworth and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-01-30 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With Mussolini ’s Italy, R.J.B. Bosworth—the foremost scholar on the subject writing in English—vividly brings to life the period in which Italians participated in one of the twentieth century’s most notorious political experiments. Il Duce’s Fascists were the original totalitarians, espousing a cult of violence and obedience that inspired many other dictatorships, Hitler’s first among them. But as Bosworth reveals, many Italians resisted its ideology, finding ways, ingenious and varied, to keep Fascism from taking hold as deeply as it did in Germany. A sweeping chronicle of struggle in terrible times, this is the definitive account of Italy’s darkest hour.
Download or read book Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy written by Daron Acemoglu and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops a framework for analyzing the creation and consolidation of democracy. Different social groups prefer different political institutions because of the way they allocate political power and resources. Thus democracy is preferred by the majority of citizens, but opposed by elites. Dictatorship nevertheless is not stable when citizens can threaten social disorder and revolution. In response, when the costs of repression are sufficiently high and promises of concessions are not credible, elites may be forced to create democracy. By democratizing, elites credibly transfer political power to the citizens, ensuring social stability. Democracy consolidates when elites do not have strong incentive to overthrow it. These processes depend on (1) the strength of civil society, (2) the structure of political institutions, (3) the nature of political and economic crises, (4) the level of economic inequality, (5) the structure of the economy, and (6) the form and extent of globalization.
Download or read book The Infernal Library written by Daniel Kalder and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2018-03-06 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A mesmerizing study of books by despots great and small, from the familiar to the largely unknown." —The Washington Post A darkly humorous tour of "dictator literature" in the twentieth century, featuring the soul-killing prose and poetry of Hitler, Mao, and many more, which shows how books have sometimes shaped the world for the worse Since the days of the Roman Empire dictators have written books. But in the twentieth-century despots enjoyed unprecedented print runs to (literally) captive audiences. The titans of the genre—Stalin, Mussolini, and Khomeini among them—produced theoretical works, spiritual manifestos, poetry, memoirs, and even the occasional romance novel and established a literary tradition of boundless tedium that continues to this day. How did the production of literature become central to the running of regimes? What do these books reveal about the dictatorial soul? And how can books and literacy, most often viewed as inherently positive, cause immense and lasting harm? Putting daunting research to revelatory use, Daniel Kalder asks and brilliantly answers these questions. Marshalled upon the beleaguered shelves of The Infernal Library are the books and commissioned works of the century’s most notorious figures. Their words led to the deaths of millions. Their conviction in the significance of their own thoughts brooked no argument. It is perhaps no wonder then, as Kalder argues, that many dictators began their careers as writers.
Download or read book How to Feed a Dictator written by Witold Szablowski and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday Anthony Bourdain meets Kapuściński in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the appetites of five of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, by the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears and What’s Cooking in the Kremlin What was Pol Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one particular cow? Traveling across four continents, from the ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Witold Szabłowski tracked down the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and massacre of their own citizens—Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot—and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat pilaf, bottles of rum, and games of gin rummy. Dishy, deliciously readable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.
Download or read book The Dictator s Handbook written by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and published by Public Affairs. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains the theory of political survival, particularly in cases of dictators and despotic governments, arguing that political leaders seek to stay in power using any means necessary, most commonly by attending to the interests of certain coalitions.
Download or read book The Dictator s Last Night written by Yasmina Khadra and published by Gallic Books. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: October 2011. In the dying days of the Libyan civil war, Muammar Gaddafi is hiding out in his home town of Sirte along with his closest advisors. They await a convoy that will take them south, away from encroaching rebel forces and NATO aerial attacks. The mood is sombre. In what will be his final night, Gaddafi reflects on an extraordinary life, whilst still raging against the West, his fellow Arab nations and the ingratitude of the Libyan people. In this gripping imagining of the last hours of President Gaddafi, Yasmina Khadra provides us with fascinating insight into the mind of one of the most complex and controversial figures of recent history.
Download or read book The Last King of Scotland written by Giles Foden and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What would it be like to become Idi Amin's personal physician? Giles Foden's bestselling thriller is the story of a young Scottish doctor drawn into the heart of the Ugandan dictator's surreal and brutal regime. Privy to Amin's thoughts and ambitions, he is both fascinated and appalled. As Uganda plunges into civil chaos he realises action is imperative - but which way should he jump?
Download or read book The Dictator s Shadow written by Heraldo Munoz and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Augusto Pinochet was the most important Third World dictator of the Cold War, and perhaps the most ruthless. In The Dictator's Shadow, United Nations Ambassador Heraldo Munoz takes advantage of his unmatched set of perspectives -- as a former revolutionary who fought the Pinochet regime, as a respected scholar, and as a diplomat -- to tell what this extraordinary figure meant to Chile, the United States, and the world. Pinochet's American backers saw his regime as a bulwark against Communism; his nation was a testing ground for U.S.-inspired economic theories. Countries desiring World Bank support were told to emulate Pinochet's free-market policies, and Chile's government pension even inspired President George W. Bush's plan to privatize Social Security. The other baggage -- the assassinations, tortures, people thrown out of airplanes, mass murders of political prisoners -- was simply the price to be paid for building a modern state. But the questions raised by Pinochet's rule still remain: Are such dictators somehow necessary? Horrifying but also inspiring, The Dictator's Shadow is a unique tale of how geopolitical rivalries can profoundly affect everyday life.
