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michaellortz's review against another edition
5.0
I enjoyed this book. I wrote a long review here: https://medium.com/hybrid-analyst/review-of-the-infernal-library-on-dictators-the-books-they-wrote-and-other-catastrophes-of-8844505b2c4
carolinemohan's review
2.5
Definitely merit to his research but like….brother…..PLEASE descend from your high Amero-centric horse.
caitcoy's review against another edition
This just isn't holding my interest so I think I'm going to add it to the DNF list for now. I may return to it another time.
fdterritory's review against another edition
4.0
A really fascinating and sober (and entertaining) look at the way dictators throughout history have used their writing to do and inspire pretty terrible things... Even though the things they write are almost always trash. A little wordy in places, but really informative and a good review of what actual dictators (and not the imagined ones of social media today) can do to the world.
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
3.0
So here's an interesting thing: with the advent of ebooks and e-readers, Hitler's Mein Kampf has become a digital bestseller. Is something sinister going on? Well,
One explanation offered for the surge in electronic sales concerns the relative anonymity offered by e-books as compared to their printed counterparts. "These are things that people would be embarrassed to read otherwise," journalist Chris Faraone, who wrote about the trend for Vocativ.com, told ABC News. "Books that people would probably be a bit more embarrassed to read or display or buy in public, they are more than willing to buy on their Kindle, or iPads." Faraone believes the phenomenon is similar to that surrounding erotic novel "Fifty Shades of Grey," which in 2012, became the first to sell more than 1 million copies on Amazon's Kindle e-reader.Similarly, libraries with copies of books such as Mein Kampf find them being frequently read (source: I have worked in a library), and online digital archives such as the Internet Archive, BNF, and Gutenberg have all recorded plentiful downloads of "controversial" books in the public domain (double source: I have also worked with all of those platforms). Personally I think it's little more than an interesting cultural phenomenon.
readrabbitwrite's review against another edition
2.0
I have mixed feelings about this book, which is annoying, because I really wanted to love it. I guess I'll paraphrase Longfellow, at the risk of sounding completely pretentious: "when it was good it was very, very good, and when it was bad it was..." To be completely fair, "horrid" is a bit extreme, because this book wasn't awful - it's just that I think it could have been better. I honestly felt the book could have been more balanced between history and analysis - sometimes (especially the early parts about Lenin, Stalin, and the USSR) I felt like the various works were getting lost in the wider history and context in which they were created, and perhaps that was the ultimate point, to see how these works were made, but... I don't know. On a more aesthetic level, while I can appreciate sarcasm and even enjoyed some of Kalder's snarkier moments, I sometimes felt the snark was distracting and that Kalder was (to give him the benefit of the doubt, likely unintentionally) mirroring the pretentious, overtly-theoretical prose which he spent much of his time dismissing.
Like I said, I don't know. It had a lot of good moments and it's definitely interesting, it's topical and relevant and I feel like I learned from it, but I'm not really sure I could honestly say I actually enjoyed reading it. But like its content, perhaps it's not so much meant to be enjoyed as it is meant to explain and teach.
Like I said, I don't know. It had a lot of good moments and it's definitely interesting, it's topical and relevant and I feel like I learned from it, but I'm not really sure I could honestly say I actually enjoyed reading it. But like its content, perhaps it's not so much meant to be enjoyed as it is meant to explain and teach.
bookwyrmbella's review against another edition
3.0
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.
*Received eARC via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.
cynt's review against another edition
1.0
There's probably a very good and important book hidden behind the self-aggrandising narrator.