Five books that get inside the minds of dictators

Daniel Kalder is the author of The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy. One of his five top books that get inside the minds of dictators, as shared at the Guardian:

Although Stalin was for decades the supreme leader of the largest country on Earth, he saw little of his empire, rarely venturing beyond the walls of the Kremlin. Instead, he experienced the USSR primarily as a series of texts that landed on his desk each day. In Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order, Sarah Davies and James Harris reconstruct his claustrophobic, insular reality through a close study of his archive, shining a spotlight on the daily business of running a massive totalitarian state. It paints a portrait of the dictator as monstrous, paper-shuffling super-bureaucrat.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue