Summary
Literacy, long upheld as a standard bearer
for progress, is not always a force for good. Had Stalin's mother
never sent him to the seminary he never would have learned to read
and so never discovered the works of Marx or Lenin. Instead he
probably would have ended up like his father a cobbler by trade and
a drunk by vocation. Throughout the twentieth century dictators
subjected captive audiences to soul-killing prose on a massive
scale. They published theoretical works, spiritual manifestos,
poetry collections, memoirs and even romance novels. Armed with
nothing but a darkly humorous wit, Daniel Kalder journeys long into
the literary night to discover what their tomes reveal about the
dictatorial soul. From the staggeringly vile and incompetent Mein
Kampf, and the 'miracles' wrought by former librarian Mao's Little
Red Book, up to the ongoing exploits of North Korea's Kim dynasty,
Dictator Literature is an unforgettable look at the power of the
pen.
