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Interviews | November 3, 2009

Sheila A.: IMG On Storytelling: The Powells.com Interview with Donald Miller



donaldmillerDonald Miller is a Christian writer, but the question that Miller asks with his latest memoir, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, is applicable to... Continue »
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Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators

by Riccardo Orizio

Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators Cover

ISBN13: 9780802714169
ISBN10: 0802714161
Condition: Standard
Dustjacket: Standard
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Inspired by newspaper clippings he had kept about two former African dictators accused of cannibalism, journalist Riccardo Orizio set out to track down tyrants around the world who had fallen from power — to see if they had gained any perspective on their actions, or if their lives and thoughts could shed any light on our own. The seven encounters chronicled in Talk of the Devil reveal Orizio's gift as an observer and his skill at getting people to reveal themselves. They are also, each of them, memorable stories in their own right.

Thanks to his conversion to Islam, the unrepentant Idi Amin lives in exile in Saudi Arabia and laughs off his murderous past while still attempting to meddle in Uganda. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the bloody former emperor of Central Africa, boasts astonishingly that Pope Paul VI had nominated him as the thirteenth apostle of the Catholic Church. Nexhmije Hoxha defends her husband's brutal Stalinist regime from her Albanian prison cell and proudly explains how it worked. Paris-based Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier — in his first interview since fleeing Haiti in 1986 — speaks about voodoo and the women of his life, and laments the loss of his fortune. Colonel Mengistu Haile-Mariam of Ethiopia, Mira Markovic (Slobodan Milosevic's wife), and General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the former Polish head of state, all claim, in one way or another, that history will do them justice.

By turns chilling and comical, rational and absurd, Talk of the Devil brings back into focus forgotten history and people we have viewed as evil incarnate. Stripped of their power and titles, they are oddly human, and in Orizio's hands, their stories, and his own, are compulsively readable.

Review:

"Readers will take deserved pleasure in these tyrants' falls, and in Orizio's sharp, literate prose." Kirkus Reviews

Synopsis:

A journalist encounters seven former dictators including Idi Amin, "Baby Doc"Duvalier, and Mira Markovic, and reports on their new lives that are by turnschilling and comical. 7 photos.

About the Author

Riccardo Orizio has been a foreign correspondent for eighteen years, living in Milan, Brussels, Atlanta, where he worked for CNN, and London, where he reported for La Repubblica. He has covered the wars in the Balkans and filed reports from more than eighty countries. The author of Lost White Tribes, which was short-listed for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, he now lives in Kenya.

Product Details

ISBN:
9780802714169
Subtitle:
Encounters with Seven Dictators
Translator:
Bardoni, Avril
Translator:
Bardoni, Avril
Author:
Orizio, Riccardo
Publisher:
Walker & Company
Location:
New York
Subject:
Biography
Subject:
History & Theory
Subject:
Modern - 20th Century
Subject:
World politics
Subject:
Dictators
Subject:
History & Theory - General
Copyright:
Edition Number:
1st
Series Volume:
127-02
Publication Date:
April 2003
Binding:
Hardcover
Language:
English
Illustrations:
Yes
Pages:
224
Dimensions:
8.76x5.72x.85 in. .83 lbs.

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