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  • Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy by Kenneth C. Davis
  • Elizabeth Bush
Davis, Kenneth C. Strongman: The Rise of Five Dictators and the Fall of Democracy. Holt, 2020 [272p] illus. with photographs
Trade ed. ISBN 9781250205643 $19.99
E-book ed. ISBN 9781250205650 $9.99
Reviewed from digital galleys Ad Gr. 6-9

The five twentieth century leaders, infamous for their power grabs and ruthless repression of citizens of their own nations, should be well-known names to most middle school readers: Benito Mussolini, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein. Here Davis, whom readers might also recognize from his Don’t Know Much About . . . titles, offers biographies on their rise to power, the political philosophies that at least ostensibly guided their governance, the radical changes they forced upon their nations, and, in some cases, their conflicted legacies within their own countries today. A pair of opening chapters set the stage with the Reichstag fire and the subsequent curtailment of civil liberties in 1933 Germany offered as a case study in opportunism, and brief histories of Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic for context. The chapters forming the substance of the title, however, are more informational than analytical; Davis occasionally cross references these dictators but does not make explicit comparisons and contrasts, nor does he explain how these five figures distinguish themselves from genocidal contemporaries such as Pol Pot and Slobodan Milošević. Perhaps most problematic is the narrow focus on internal affairs, with no probing discussion of response to their depredations by other world leaders who failed to hold them in check. Nonetheless, this has some use as a collective biography, if not as an investigation. Bibliography, source notes, and an index are included.

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