An approachable discussion of a brand of political menace that seems both faded into history and oddly relevant.
Comparative study of eight dictators, plumbing the connections between their ruthless political narratives and their fluctuating popular appeal.
Samuel Johnson Prize winner Dikötter (Chair, Humanities/Univ. of Hong Kong; The Cultural Revolution: A People's History, 1962-1976, 2016, etc.) writes with academic rigor and awareness that these megalomaniacal figures continue to inspire fascination relevant to politically volatile times—see Putin, Erdoğan, and others. “Throughout the twentieth century,” writes the author, “hundreds of millions of people cheered their own dictators, even as they were herded down the road to serfdom.” Dikötter moves from the most notorious dictators—Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il-sung—to the less well-known, including Haiti’s Duvalier, Romania’s Ceausesçu, and Ethiopia’s Mengistu. Mussolini established the fascist autocrat archetype almost accidentally, consolidating power with a spike in state-sanctioned violence. He received sustained popular acclaim while seeking a “self-sufficient economy” to prepare for war until his calamitous alliance with one-time protégé Hitler. Of the quintessential dictator, the author writes, “when Hitler had given his first political speech at a beer hall in Munich, few could have predicted his rise to power….He enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle, reading widely and pursuing his passion for opera and architecture.” While he was a master manipulator of his political circle, he channeled his popular appeal into “a costly war of attrition.” Following a chronicle of the devastation of World War II—and a similarly compelling examination of the ruthless Stalin—the author examines the politically complex and socially brutal reigns of Mao and Kim. “As Kim’s word became absolute the epithets used to describe him became ever more extravagant,” and “his cult extended to his family.” While Dikötter focuses broadly on the biographies of each dictator (and their crucial sycophant enablers), each chapter establishes a firm sense of time and place, capturing the palpable dread these figures established within their societies.
An approachable discussion of a brand of political menace that seems both faded into history and oddly relevant.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-379-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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