I don't know why I suddenly wanted to read this book. I had been very carefully cocooning myself against all the horrors of the world by reading six D. E. Stevenson books in a row. But I had seen a review of the book back when it came out and then somehow it popped up on my radar again. I do sometimes go to National Review to read commentary, though I haven't been going nearly as much as I used to. I never got into reading Jay Nordlinger who is a contributor there and the author of this book. Usually I read Jonah Goldberg (who I often agree with or just appreciate his views, but sometimes I think he's completely missed the boat) and David French, who I like a lot except he is way too hawkish on foreign/military stuff. Anyhoo, I did download this book on my kindle. I read it in a few days. It's a weird book.
First of all, Jay Nordlinger writes in a friendly, casual style that really hit me at times as just not the right voice for this kind of material. Secondly, I found that summarizing the lives of 20 brutal dictators' children was just too big a scope for what the book wanted to be. I think he could have gone more in depth if he had limited himself. Trying to follow the different lives of scores and scores of children would have been less confusing and redundant if he'd just picked two, for example, from each region of the globe. The truth is that brutal dictators, whether they come from the right or the left, act pretty much the same and tend to have the same sorts of issues with their children, or rather their children must grapple with the same sorts of issues. Most of the children join their fathers in their lives of privilege and oppression. If they don't out and out join, they at least become apologists for him. A very few try to distance themselves, Stalin's daughter Svetlana, Castro's daughter, Alina, and Idi Amin's son Jaffer, are the three that stand out as those who realized how evil their father was and tried to live better lives out of his shadow. I really found these three the most interesting. If Nordlinger wanted to do more than a superficial survey of the 'children of monsters' he could have taken these three and then contrasted them with three children who completely embraced their father's regime. I think that would have been a deeper, more interesting and more psychologically illuminating way to approach this subject matter. He does compare and contrast some, but I kept forgetting who was who in the large glossary of names.
One weird effect this book had was making me slightly less upset at Trump. Even though I find him repugnant and wish he was not president, even though I hate what he is doing to immigrants, he still is no where in the league of these horrible brutal, power-hungry, bloodthirsty dictators. If you read the news from day to day on the internet, you can (or at least I can!) get so worked up about everything that it all seems so hopeless and depressing. This book put things into perspective for me in two ways: 1) we've still got it really good here, in spite of hitting a nadir in political life and 2) diabolical evil is real. I knew that. But I live in my own little bubble and so it all seems unreal to me most of the time. But it isn't.
Even so, while I found the book interesting and a quick read, I also found it fundamentally unsatisfying.
For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.
No comments:
Post a Comment