Dictator Style, by British newspaper columnist Peter York, is easily one of the strangest coffee-table books ever published. Who knows what the publishers were thinking when they agreed to print a words-and-pictures essay about the home lives of the world’s worst modern tyrants. Fortunately, this book is a lot more than a glossy photospread of gardens and curtains: it is a history lesson in disguise, giving us a glimpse — through gardens and curtains — into the minds of some of the world’s most reviled figures.

At almost every turn, York’s scorn for these megalomaniacs is evident.Maybe this is because he didn’t want to be seen as humanizing hated dictators (as if they were nothing more than the well-to-do subjects of a Better Homes & Gardens spread) or maybe it’s because their cunning, cruelty and insanity are all vital elements to understanding their home lives.

From Saddam Hussein’s “deeply sadistic and utterly absurd” fantasy- novel-style murals to Hitler and Stalin’s sparse but huge and imposing countryretreats, there is one thing these dictators’ homes were not: humble.

York suggests this fact is a result of their upbringing. Most of the dictators grew up as poor and ordinary, if somewhat disturbed, people who rode to power on a revolutionary tide and then set themselves up as the latest nouveau riche, flaunting their wealth in the manner of a Silicon Valleydot-com millionaire or a ghetto kidwhose signature on an NBA contractis still drying.

These homes are symbols of power,to be paraded in front of the world via adoring photographers, yet another method to prop up a tyrant whose claim to authority is shaky. And, as with most nouveau riche, their tastes were questionable at best.

At times, York’s technical descriptions of tyrants’ homes decay into tabloid-like gossip about them. One passage about Benito Mussolini assertsthat the Italian dictator had sex with a different woman every day for 14 years; in another, Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz’s gaudily ornate personal rail carriage is described as “the kind of Texan whorehouse we see in westerns … ideal for the assignations of an elderly Latin American soldier who liked to play away from home.”

In the end, York strikes such a fine balance between the deadly seriousness of his subjects and his mockeryof their esthetics that it’s hard to tellwhether we should shudder at theseglimpses into the minds of some of humanity’s worst killers or laugh at theirpompous ideas of what a home should look like.

But it all leads to one inevitable conclusion: whether it came to morals or murals, these men were just plain wrong.

Dose
Wednesday, April 10, 2006