Daniel Kalder

Dictator Literature

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. 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.