Publisher's Synopsis
The Desktop Digest of Dictators and Despots is a compendium and quick reference guide to history's most notorious absolutist rulers and authoritarian regimes. In a handsome hardcover format, this handy encyclopedia of totalitarians is as informative as it is titillating, a lurid panorama of history's most malignant autarchs with original full-color portraits and accompanying psychobiographical profiles. From pharaohs to ayatollahs, from Caesar to Hitler, here are fifty-three profiles of history's most warped personalities and their shocking crimes.
- Roman Emperor Nero, who lit the roads to the Coliseum's night games by lining them with human torches made of the burning bodies of crucified Christians
- Alfredo Stroessner, under whose administration Paraguay offered comfortable refuge to former Nazis while rifle-toting "sportsmen" flocked to the countryside on weekends to legally hunt Indians
- Idi Amin, the dictator of Uganda, where power outages at the capitol were a routine occurrence because the sluiceways at the nearby hydroelectric dam were clogged with the bodies of so many citizens executed in his torture cells that the pampered local disposal team-the crocodiles-couldn't eat them fast enough