Started: 4/19/10
Finished: 4/30/10
Year: 2002
Pages: 189
Genre: History
Grade: B
Reason for reading: grabbed off the TBS shelf
Blurb (from book jacket): "Evil is a fact of life. We can see it, not only in the reigns of Stalin and Hitler, but also in everyday crimes like murder, rape and assault-quite apart from the millions of lives brutalized by political or religious oppression, poverty, disease and starvation.
"One factor unites the sixteen men and women featured in this book and the evil acts they committed-they all had unlimited power over the people whose lives they controlled. Their reigns of terror cover a time-span of nearly two thousand years, from the rule of Caligula over the Roman Empire starting in 37AD, to the genocide of education Cambodians under Pol Pot during the 1980s. Motivated by power, religion, political belief, or by sadism and lust, and sometimes by insantity, they have become bywords for terror throughout the world.
"As ths book shows, however, there are degrees of evil. Hitler and Stalin between them murdered tens of millions of people: Elizabeth Bathrory, the so-called 'Countess Dracula,' probably fewer than the hundreds named by her accusers. Even so, the red threads of cruelty, torture and terror that run through these sixteen lives makes this fascinating, if uncomfortable, book a terrifying record of cold-hearted brutality, an infamous roll of inhumanity on a scale almost incomprehensible in its lack of tolerance and mercy."
Opinion: An interesting historical look at some of the cruelist people to have ever lived. Most of the 16, people would recognize.
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