5 stars for sure!!! It was a lot better than I expected it to be but luckily it mixed a lot of history with talking about the food each chef served and it was way more to it than just culinary talk. I love how the author separates and perfectly breaks apart the 5 different stories. This book is a hidden gem and I highly recommend it. A book about 20th century world history, genocide, revolutions and food. Who couldn't love reading about that?? ( )

5 stars for sure!!! It was a lot better than I expected it to be but luckily it mixed a lot of history with talking about the food each chef served and it was way more to it than just culinary talk. I love how the author separates and perfectly breaks apart the 5 different stories. This book is a hidden gem and I highly recommend it. A book about 20th century world history, genocide, revolutions and food. Who couldn't love reading about that?? ( )

Everyone needs to eat and if you can afford to have someone else cook for you, then take that opportunity with both hands. So, of course dictators have chefs but it seems only Mr Szablowski thought to track down the chefs of former dictators.

While it's not an exhaustive list of dictators (no North Koreans feature, for example), we get an interesting cross section of hungry, powerful men, with the chefs of Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enva Hoxha and Fidel Castro spilling the beans on the personal lives and meal preferences of their employers. While it must have been stressful knowing that one bad meal could have had you killed, the chefs are all quite sanguine about it, discussing their boss's favorite meals and in some cases their close escapes from execution by said boss's and yet still speak warmly of those men. ( )

5 stars for sure!!! It was a lot better than I expected it to be but luckily it mixed a lot of history with talking about the food each chef served and it was way more to it than just culinary talk. I love how the author separates and perfectly breaks apart the 5 different stories. This book is a hidden gem and I highly recommend it. A book about 20th century world history, genocide, revolutions and food. Who couldn't love reading about that?? ( )

I find books like this fascinating. They offer a look at the world from an unusual angle and broaden one's understanding. I very much enjoyed Witold Szabłowski's writing. He sometimes found discrepancies between the story he was told by the cooks and their earlier statements, or from other sources. He questioned them about these, but in the end let the cook tell the story as he saw it at the time of the interview.

The cooks give a very human look at the dictators that they cooked for. Only Cuba is still under the same regime, although Fidel Castro, of course, has died. Some of the cooks, like Erasmo Hernandez of Cuba and Yong Moeun of Cambodia, had joined the revolutionary forces of their future boss before they came to power, and still look very favorably upon them. They became cooks by chance, because their comrades needed them to be. Others, like Abu Ali, Otonde Omere, and Mr. K., were pursuing careers as cooks, and were selected based on their previous work, without having actually applied for the job. These three remember their bosses with mixed feelings -- on one hand they could be very nice and generous with their cooks, but they were sometimes volatile, and in any case, the cook was very aware of the violence that their patrons where persecuting.

In addition to the cooks, Szabłowski made a point of discussing the past and present situation with people that his guides were introduced to, or whom he simply met. He also consulted historians to give him perspective. Some of the dictators indeed made great contributions to their nations, but their violence washed away most of the gratitude that anyone might have felt.

I feel wiser and more informed for having read this book, and it was also a joy to read. I soon intend to pick up Szabłowski's previous book, Dancing Bears, about people who preferred living under tyranny. ( )