Talk of the Devil: Encounters with Seven Dictators FROM THE PUBLISHER
Riccardo Orizio has sought out deposed dictators around the world -- in part to witness what effect (if any) forced retirement has had on their conscience, in part to see what light their lives and thoughts can shed on our own. He found Idi Amin, before he died, living as a guest in Saudi Arabia, laughing off his murderous past, while Paris-based Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier -- in his first interview since fleeing Haiti -- speaks about voodoo and the women in his life.
By turns chilling and comical, rational and absurd, the seven encounters in Talk of the Devil showcase Orizio's gifts of observation and his skill at getting people to reveal themselves and bring 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.
FROM THE CRITICS
USA Today
Chapters of this book should be mandatory reading in high school history classes. They show what evils people can unleash and that the horrors of a Hitler or Stalin are not just in the past. Although uneven, the tales of these tyrants punch through in vivid ways. — Tom Squitieri
The Washington Post
Orizio specifically pursued figures whose careers ended in utter disgrace, in the indignity of exile or imprisonment, because those despots still in power, or those merely ousted from it, "tend not to examine their own conscience." And so he tracked down figures like Amin and Bokassa, as well as Nexhmije Hoxa, widow and co-tyrant of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, Polish premier Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski, Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier, Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile-Mariam and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his wife, Mira. Orizio seems to have hoped to come up with a series of cautionary narratives told by the tyrants themselves, and thereby to humanize these remote and forbidding figures. — Chandrahas Choudhury
Publishers Weekly
The "devils" in this series of stakeouts are disgraced, deposed dictators, and one thing's for sure: they're not about to apologize for the atrocities they and their underlings committed. An Italian journalist, Orizio travels around the world to speak with leaders ranging from Uganda's Idi Amin to the Polish Communist Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski. Only those leaders who have not truly been rehabilitated qualify under Orizio's criteria. The results, while generally strong, are a bit uneven. Some of the interviews are stunning-the current wife of former Haitian ruler "Baby Doc" Duvalier defends her husband's regime as bringing equality to darker-skinned Haitians, while the former Ethiopian ruler Haile Mengistu defends his reign of terror as necessary to fight "chaos." These aren't people about to reform their ways. In fact, several of the leaders, or in some cases their wives, appear to be planning for dictatorship redux. In Albania, for instance, the wife of Stalinist Enver Hoxha gets out of jail and begins campaigning for a return to power. "The forces of obscurantism have destroyed the Socialist system in Albania," she says. Other trips are less fruitful. Orizio's search for Idi Amin in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, where he now lives as a fervent Muslim, seems like a wild goose chase until, as Orizio's about to give up and leave, he's granted a few minutes with the notorious Amin. But even there, the author weaves in enough history to make the chapter worthwhile. This tale of a journalist looking for former tyrants now living in relative obscurity is entertaining and raises provocative questions about what these men deserve for their cruel reigns. 7 b&w photos. (May) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Italian journalist Orizio (Lost White Tribes, 2001) calls on seven of the worldﾽs leading monsters and reports their various comeuppances. Opening up files amassed during 18 years as a foreign correspondent, the author profiles formerly newsmaking despots now largely forgotten. Idi Amin, the former dictator of Uganda, is the most fortunate of Orizioﾽs subjects: having converted to Islam in the final days of his rule, when he indeed ate a few of his compatriots (complaining all the while that human meat was too salty), Amin skedaddled to Saudi Arabia, where he spends his days in well-appointed gyms and shopping malls. (An Indian shopkeeper in Jeddah describes him as "one of my best customers. A delightful man.") But Amin, Orizio reports, appears to be restless, and lately he has been masterminding a guerrilla insurrection in northern Uganda in the hope of one day returning to power. Less ambitious is Wojciech Jaruzelski, the general who ruled Poland with an iron hand during the Solidarity uprising; he is content to live out his days, by Orizioﾽs account, with a small state pension, attending parties at the Russian embassy in Warsaw and occasionally protesting that had he not cracked down on dissidents, the Soviets surely would have done so. Neither Baby Doc Duvalier, the onetime supreme boss of Haiti, nor Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the deposed self-styled emperor of what is now the Central African Republic, harbor much hope of returning to power--living in comfort in France, they donﾽt have much reason to. Others, however, long for the day when they can exercise their inhuman skills in terror; notable among them is Mira Markovic, who with husband Slobodan Milosevic pushed Yugoslavia toward adecade of wars while "they chirruped between themselves like the lovers on a Valentine card." Readers will take deserved pleasure in these tyrantsﾽ falls, and in Orizioﾽs sharp, literate prose.
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