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A tour of the merciless leaders who inflicted their books upon society, featuring the soul-killing prose and poetry of Hitler, Mao and many more

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A Book of the Year for The Times and the Sunday Times

´The writer is the engineer of the human soul,´ claimed Stalin. Although one wonders how many found nourishment in Turkmenbashi´s Book of the Soul (once required reading for driving tests in Turkmenistan), not to mention Stalin´s own poetry. Certainly, to be considered great, a dictator must write, and write a lot. Mao had his Little Red Book , Mussolini and Saddam Hussein their romance novels, Kim Jong-il his treatise on the art of film, Hitler his hate-filled tracts. What do these texts reveal about their authors, the worst people imaginable? And how did they shape twentieth-century history? To find out, Daniel Kalder read them all - the badly written and the astonishingly badly written - so that you don´t have to. This is the untold history of books so terrible they should have been crimes.

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´Daniel Kalder has slogged his way through the 20th century´s "Krakatoa-like eruption of despotic verbiage" so you don´t have to... Kalder´s dispatches from "the transnational empire of ultra-boredom" are not only very funny, they also form a quirky, pacey guide to recent world history.´
Sunday Times , Books of the Year

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Daniel Kalder is the author of Lost Cosmonaut and Strange Telescopes . He has contributed to BBC Radio, Esquire , the Guardian and The Times among other publications. Originally from Fife, Scotland, he lived in Moscow for ten years before moving to Texas, where he currently resides. danielkalder.com

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