Power Mad! A Book of Deranged Dictators
History is filled with the tragic legacies of demented tyrants, but it's clear that it's not just human life which suffers at the whim of these mad, mad men. Power Mad! charts the astonishing demands and 'policies' of the world's most deranged dictators - from Chairman Mao banning The Sound of Music as 'a blatant example of capitalist pornography' to 'Papa Doc' Duvalier rewriting the Lord's Prayer for blanket use in Haitian schools ('Our Doc, who art in the National Palace for life...'). Read all about Paraguay's hopeless three-front war, launched while its leader was in the grip of Napoleonic delusion; Baby Doc's blatant theft of [pound]20 million from Haiti's treasury, to keep up his wife's extravagant lifestyle; and the Equatorial Guinean leader who once initiated a cabinet reshuffle by openly clubbing his foreign minister to death. These grisly, fantastic, unbelievable abuses of power are comprehensively detailed in this candid collection of power gone mad. From the paranoid to the prejudiced, the megalomaniacs to the money-mad, the astounding, authentic histories of our most deranged dictators are all sewn up in this bumper book. Book jacket.