The cooks that made food for dictators like Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Enver Hunxa, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro are interviewed for the book How to Feed A Dictator. It contains interviews with those people, some chapters providing context of the historical circumstances around the dictators in question, and even certain recipes.
It has food, it has history, and it has a curious framing device, what's not to like! The history of world seen through what people eat, at a personal level, is a curious one, and it's a great gift for readers like myself that the Polish journalist Witold M. wrote this book.
I could go on and on about various characters, the lady who appeared to have been in love with Pol Pot and still won't admit he did anything wrong, or Saddam's cook who states Saddam was by far the sanest and the nicest person in the household, but that's just a bad writer rephrasing a great piece of work. Disappointing and not reflective of the charm and shine of the original work.
9/10 stars, highly recommend it to everybody, it's possible I might go back to read this book quite often.
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