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How to Feed a Dictator

Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot Through the Eyes of Their Cooks

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How to Feed a Dictator

By: Witold Szablowski, Antonia Lloyd-Jones - translator
Narrated by: Michael Crouch, Peter Francis James, Maggi-Meg Reed
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About this listen

 “Amazing stories . . . Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” —Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday

Anthony Bourdain meets Kapuściński in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the appetites of five of the twentieth century's most infamous dictators, by the acclaimed author of Dancing Bearsand What’s Cooking in the Kremlin

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 Szabłowski 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 life under tyranny. Food & Wine Gastronomy Politicians Politics & Activism Politics & Government Presidents & Heads of State Africa Middle East Latin American
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This book is amazing. I’d read various bio’s on Pol Pot and Castro but the view from the kitchen provides the reader with a very different interpretation of the past. The structure of the book is sliced into sections which makes it accessible to all readers.

This will be the book I will be recommending to people this year.

Cooks up a storm

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