The Desktop Digest of Dictators and Despots is a compendium and quick reference guide to history’s most notorious absolutist rulers and authoritarian regimes. In a handsome hardcover format, this handy encyclopedia of totalitarians is as informative as it is titillating, a lurid panorama of history’s most malignant autarchs with original full-color portraits and accompanying psychobiographical profiles. From pharaohs to ayatollahs, from Caesar to Hitler, here are fifty-three profiles of history’s most warped personalities and their shocking crimes. The horrifying pageant of tyranny has trailed in its wake a vicious train of exploitation, intolerance and oppression—war, conquest, subjugation, slavery, imprisonment, torture and execution—which continues unabated to the present day. Dictators never disappoint when it comes to proving that absolute power corrupts absolutely. This is the perfect handbook for educators, armchair historians, and pop-culture pundits.
Poorly edited, repetitive, anecdotal and ill-supported stories of selected dictators. Short snippets might be appropriate for popular, somewhat baseless bathroom reading.
As an entertainment book it passes due to only mentioning terse notorious/evil/shocking deeds/character traits of the people it covers which gives the the book a rather "pulpy" vibe set out to amuse rather than inform.
Thus, as historical reference book it fails due its informal, sometimes humoristic approach and lack of important detail supposed to cover the subject matter in an "encyclopedia" type book .