An interesting topic I've never really thought about, but man is it long! It also drags at spots. It was interesting to find out why the author decided to go down this rabbit trail.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this book.

In Fahrenheit 451, books ar banned because of their ideas. War, strife, destruction are all caused by books. Daniel Kalder looks at these works, some of which are responsible for 94 million death. He examines them and turns them into a history lesson going forward. Will we learn from our infernal history?

Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler first enticed followers with their books and pamphlets. Words that led to the deaths of millions of people (or what has been attributed to a Stalin, a statistic). Kelder expertly and somewhat snarkily reviews the literature and its impact.

He spent a lot of time heckling Marx and I felt the Mussolini piece was a stretch. Most Communist regimes will use the works of Lenin, Mao, and Marx to keep people in line. I am not sure it is a belief in the book. The book was a tipping point often in an already perilous situation. The use of the book past that point is just to justify the dictatorships. Great examination of the impact of literature.

Fascinating concept that offers new insights into some very unsavory characters. A different way of approaching psychological history.

Unfortunately, I didn't particularly enjoy this title. It felt overly long, and sometimes the writing felt as though I should be trusting what it said implicitly, which is exactly what he accused people of doing to the dictators writings.

Not my fave, don't want to give it bad press so I didn't publish my review.

I received a digital ARC of this book from Netgalley.

I have to admire Daniel Kalder's tenacity, if nothing else- the man read a huge number of absolutely awful books to write this one. I don't know if there's enough money in the world for me to read the complete writings of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, never mind all the sad ass, second rate dictator scribbles that Kalder wades through.

Honestly, it's kind of amazing that dictators are all such awful writers. I mean, we want to believe that good art requires a certain generosity of spirit, a real talent for empathy and understanding your fellow man, but history has proven this is not necessarily the case. Plenty of famous, beloved, even genius authors were real dickheads. And yet there are no critically acclaimed books by dictators, not counting the wannabe Nazi's masturbating over Mein Kampf. Kalder concludes that the only dictator with a hint of talent was Mussolini, whose writings regarding the first world war show some of the realness and pain experienced by the soldiers fighting it.

So, if you ever have a hankering to read the collected works of some of history's greatest villains, feel free to read this instead. It's a fascinating, disturbing, occasionally funny read.

Solidly meh. I enjoyed learning about the lesser known “classics” of this genre (Saddam Hussein’s historical romance novels, anyone?), but the more well-known Soviet Union works bored me to tears (as I’m sure they did their original readers as well). And oh my goodness, the author loves the words “vituperate,” “homunculus,” and “millenarian.”

I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley.

This title is a great addition to any general non-fiction collection. There is a little something for everyone in this title, and it continues to shock and inform without seeming over the top. This is a great addition to any library collection looking for non-fiction titles with a general appeal and wow-factor as well as a good addition to any home library for a person with an interest in history and politics.

I have always been fascinated by history and why people did the things they did. This book was about some of the famous dictators we have all heard of and the books they have had published with their ideology. While the author did a lot of research and explained the different dictator's era's very well, the actually reading came off very dry. Some of the details and references are too in depth for the casual reader. I saw a glimpse of how amusing the author can write based on the introduction of the book but I think the research got in the way of his natural writing. This is the kind of book that would be best suited for someone who is doing research for a school project on a specific dictator mentioned in this book.

*Received eARC via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

I received this copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Hitler, Mao, Stalin. Besides murdering millions of people and being dictators, they have something else in common: they wrote. And they weren't alone. Many dictators of the twentieth century were writers and Daniel Kalder has read their works. From the somewhat distant past (Lenin) to the fairly recent (romance novel writing Saddam Hussein) to the well known (Mussolini) to the lesser known Turkmenbashi), Kalder read them all.
Kalder's tone is a bit different from what one might usually encounter in non-fiction. He is a noticeable presence throughout the book and his tone is quite sarcastic. I found myself laughing at times. I don't usually enjoy sarcasm, but it was perfect in The Infernal Library. These were not good men. Many are responsible for the deaths of millions of people....not collectively, but individually. Because of them, the twentieth century was a very bloody place. They deserve no reverence and Kalder does not give any to them.
I can't imagine reading these men's works willingly. I remember struggling through an except of Mein Kampf in college, and was left with zero desire to read the rest. Yet it was interesting how these men influenced one another and how some changed from the beginning of their rule to the end. I have no desire to read their works, but Kalder has done it for me.

This was definitely very fascinating to read and wonder if this dictator literature still has an impact on the world right now and is it even possible to counter it in this age of fake news, propaganda and information being provided by twitter bots.
Definitely a must read and very thought provoking, even though it can get a little dry at times.

As a librarian, this is a very fascinating read. A great analysis of 20th century dictators as writers and readers. The power of information was as real in the days of treatises and political newspapers as it is today with social media propaganda.

This a different look at literature that was written by dictators. Most of the books I haven't heard of before.

Sarcasm, parody, absurdism and irony are great ways to strip off stuff’s mask and show the unpleasant reality behind it. The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, “then” what do we do? Irony’s useful for debunking illusions, but most of the illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone. Once everybody knows that equality of opportunity is bunk and Mike Brady’s bunk and Just Say No is bunk, now what do we do? All we seem to want to do is keep ridiculing the stuff. Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.

-- David Foster Wallace, in Burn, Stephen J (ed.), Conversations with David Foster Wallace, p. 48.

This quote, which Wallace made in different forms in various interviews throughout his life, is starting to appear so often that it is now edging into cliché, but it is appropriate here, I feel, because this is a perfectly good book which, if not ruined, is certainly lessened by frequent unwelcome sarcastic asides. The author explains that the sheer unadulterated badness of dictator literature drove him into an emotional state, which is certainly reasonable. However, a writer may write in an emotional state, but then should edit in an unemotional state. If the writer cannot bring himself to do this, he should hire someone to do it before his or her book sees the light of day.

An example: Kalder twice punctuates particularly asinine quotations of dictator nonsense by the one-word sentence: “Quite” (Kindle locations 3077 and 3826 of my egalley copy). If we, the readers, have picked up a book and noticed that the title calls books by dictators “catastrophes of literature”, then it seems reasonable to assume that we will be able to tell that idiotic quotes are idiotic. We don't need a flag, even a one-word flag, from the author. We are smart enough to know idiocy when it is presented to us.

There are many longer examples of author sarcasm in this book.

The sarcasm is a shame, because there are plenty of good ideas, too. For example, the author discusses the soul-killing aspect of living in a society where dictator-written books are published in large quantity. These books invariably accompany a cult of personality for the leader. Failure to participate in the cult may result in, at best, an inability to access state-distributed benefits (a vacation dacha, adequate medical care), or, at worst, imprisonment. So people invariable buy these books because, after all, they are usually very reasonably priced, and prominently displaying the great leader's volumes in your living room will deprive malevolent neighbors a pretext of ratting you out as insufficiently worshipful or, if you are ratted out, provide a more convincing backdrop for your protestations of innocents should you be unfortunate enough to attract the attentions of the internal security apparatus. People tell themselves there's no harm in doing what you must to survive in a dictatorship, but there's something soul-destroying about having to gaze, even day, at these books, sitting accusingly on your bookshelves, telling you that you, too, are going along with the lie that the dictator is a great man, evidence of your complicity and cowardice staring at you from a prominent place in your home.

Lest I give the impression that the author gives Western liberal democracy a gold star and a free pass, let me also include a well-turned (to make clear: that adjective is NOT sarcasm) comment on the current state of US political rhetoric:

In the United States, however, it seems that we are forever standing on the edge of a political precipice, that a new Hitler or Stalin is forever waiting in the wings to impose tyranny as soon as he is able. The carelessness with which extreme historical analogies are drawn and the frequency with which apocalyptic prophecies are uttered might be amusing were they not so exhausting and did these jeremiads not have so detrimental an effect upon thinking about what is actually happening in the world.

In summary, an OK book that could have been a lot better.

Note: The “great essay somewhere” that Wallace refers to in the blockquote at the top is "Alcohol & Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking" by Lewis Hyde. The quote there is: "Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage." The essay is available as a 20-page (unsearchable) .pdf here. The quote appears on page 16. Thanks to reddit contributor “yee-lum”, who did the detective work on this quote and posted the results here.

I received a free electronic galley copy of this book for review. Thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co. for their generosity.

One way to sum up this book on behalf of its author would be “I’ve subjected myself to this genre of literature so that you don’t have to.”

To say the least, he’s done quite the favor to readers everywhere. It’s little wonder that most of us have never heard of the overwhelmingly majority of the titles put forth by the array of some of the 20th century’s largest figures (and most of the ones we have heard of are just that - mere titles standing far above their actual content). What quotes Kalder provides offers glimpses into what appear to be a diverse variety of literary slogs, ranging from dense and dry theory to absurd works of fiction and to collections of disjointed, contextless snippets. Even while reading these mere blurbs, I often found myself fighting fast-rising urges to skim or even skip over them entirely.

These little bits of literary torment however are well worth it, however, for in his coverage of dictator literature Kalder provides insight into both the men who spawned them, and the various contexts from which these authors originally sprang from. On top of this, Kalder offers an array of commentary, bitingly blunt observations, and sometimes just mere phrases that feel all-too applicable to this day and age, which feels excessively full of “strongmen” leaders that at times bear more unsettling similarities to the figures covered in “The Infernal Library” than not. One particular line that jumped out to me overly so was nothing more than part of sentence describing Stalin’s grandiose claim that socialism had been more or less achieved in the Soviet Union: “the year the gulf between the word and the world reached epic proportions.” Again, it’s nothing more than a fragment of a sentence, yet that seemed to encapsulate much of what it written and spoken by many dictators and autocratic-minded figures of both the past and this tumultuous present day - no matter their style or the type of works or words they produce, all seem to face a gap between the worlds they are think they’re creating, and the state of things as they actually stands.

Kalder’s work could not be better timed. Through his heroic dive into the depths of awful despotic literature, only does he provide us a better understanding of the figures whose acts continue to reverberate into the present day, but also better comprehension of the unfortunately-similar figures that will follow in their wakes, working hard to try and shape reality with their disconnected words every step of the way.

This book certainly does represent an interesting project: a report on the literary works of the worst dictators of recent history, as well as a few others (such as Marx) whom apparently the author holds in equally low esteem. I abandoned the book after a few chapters, as, unfortunately, the author seems to have felt it necessary to express his anger towards these individuals in almost every sentence, which does not promise a real critical examination of their works. Reading without sympathy is, in the final analysis, not reading, and if one cannot read something with sympathy, perhaps one should not read it all. I chose not to finish this book for that reason, and I have the impression, admittedly on the basis of incomplete evidence, that the author might have done better to follow the same advice. However, I expect that others, less put off than I by the constant barrage of predictable and obvious moral condemnation, could find some information here worth gleaning, and the author deserves credit for tackling a task many others could not stomach.

A fascinating collection on what dictators did and what they read.

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley

I have to admit, I almost didn’t request this title from Netgalley. It wasn’t that the topic, a study of works by dictators, didn’t sound interesting. It did, but there also seemed a possibility for dryness, and I really wasn’t in the mood. But I requested it anyway.

I am very happy I did. Mr. Kalder, I am sorry for thinking it would be dry.

Honesty, you know you are in good hands when the book starts, “This is a book about dictator literature – that is to say, it is a book about the canon of works written or attributed to dictators. As such, it is a book about some of the worst books ever written, and so was excruciatingly painful to research.”

Kalder took one for the team, and quite frankly, we should repay him by reading this book.

The book isn’t so much literary criticism; though Kalder does not shy away from calling a bad book a bad book. For instance, on The Green Book, “it is not merely boring, or banal, or repetitive, or nonsensical, although it is certainly all those things. It is quite simply, stupid . . . “.

And he is fair, for Kalder notes of Mussolini’s bodice ripper (which isn’t really one apparently) that it is readable.

His survey of literature starts with the Russian revolution and includes present day dictators. Kalder is also as funny as, well, Monty Python.

What Kalder does is look at not only what the writings reveal about the dictators, but also why people didn’t take the books seriously as warnings of things to come. He points out that some people should have known better. He also connects it to the thinking and control process, showing how the works did reflect the personality of each man (and they are all men). He also addresses the weird beliefs that make their way into the books – Hussain had strange ideas about bears.

The book is an entertaining journey into some really strange minds that produced some really bad literature. Luckily for the reader, Kalder read it for us.

I first encountered "dictator lit" in a history of the epic of Gilgamesh, since Saddam Hussein tried his hand at turning it into an overwrought romance novel. Kalder here sees the whole panorama of work, whether deliberately written as ponderous and dull--like Lenin's pre-Revolutionary studies--to convince censors that publication would be harmless, or truly and irretrievably bad because the author combined lack of talent with the lack of anyone capable of saying no. If you ever wanted to see Stalin's crappy poetry, or fanfiction from Kim Jong-Un, here's your chance.