How To Feed A Dictator

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 Szablowski 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 what it was like to be behind the scenes at some of the turning points of the last century.

“"Witold Szablowski is a born storyteller." -- Ian Buruma, author of Year Zero and Murder in Amsterdam "Szablowski writes in a simple, vivid style . . . with [a] fine sense of the comic and the absurd." -- Orlando Figes, The New York Review of Books”

"Food and history buffs will find these firsthand accounts irresistible. . . . Throughout, Szablowski entertains with disturbing rumors, such as [Idi] Amin eating human flesh (whatever the case, his chef never cooked it for him), and strange obsessions ([Fidel] Castro preferred the milk from a single cow named Ubre Blanca, or "white udder"). . . . These are the kinds of stories only a chef could know." --Publishers Weekly "Its originality and topicality in a world increasingly governed by political strongmen [are] intriguing. . . . The author shares intimate historical insights into the meaning of life under dictatorship." --Kirkus Reviews

"Fascinating . . . A new perspective on horrible people . . . Interesting anecdotal revelations . . . The chefs' biographical narratives . . . present variations on the themes of rare opportunity, terrifying pressure, and lives permanently warped by proximity to power and cruelty." --Booklist

"A quick read, but tense. I was surprised at how fast my pulse was going when reading." --Victoria Irwin, FangirlNation

"An interesting combination of politics and food . . . It hit the spot." --Reading Envy

"Unique and startling--an amazing book. Here's Abu Ali, describing the fish soup with tomatoes, almonds, and apricots that was Saddam Hussein's favorite. And here's Otonde Odera, reminiscing about the steak and kidney pie that won him a huge pay raise from Idi Amin. These accounts of killers at table, delivered in the cooks' own words and placed in historical context by Szablowski, are all the more hair-raising for Szablowski's matter-of-fact prose. He isn't writing about monsters, but monstrous human beings--and that's the scary part." --Laura Shapiro, author of What She Ate and Julia Child: A Life

"Witold Szablowski is a born storyteller." --Ian Buruma, author of Year Zero and Murder in Amsterdam

"Szablowski writes in a simple, vivid style . . . with [a] fine sense of the comic and the absurd." --Orlando Figes, The New York Review of Books

Witold Szablowski is an award-winning Polish journalist and the author of Dancing Bears- True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny. At age twenty-five he became the youngest reporter at one of Poland's largest daily newspapers, where he covered international stories in countries including Cuba, South Africa, and Iceland, and won awards for his features on the problem of illegal immigrants flocking to the European Union and the 1943 massacre of Poles in Ukraine. His book about Turkey, The Assassin from Apricot City, won two awards and was nominated for Poland's most prestigious literary prize. Szablowski lives in Warsaw.

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