Böcker av Chris Mikul

Dictators may be among the worst people in history, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't laugh at them. In My Favourite Dictators, Chris Mikul tells the stories of eleven of the twentieth century's most colourful and reviled human beings, including Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Muammar Gaddafi, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-il. In each case, he examines the political backgrounds to their rise to power and eventual downfall, but the focus here is on the personalities, peculiarities and private lives of these very strange men. You'll be amazed and appalled by their effortless cruelties, voracious sexual appetites, absurd personality cults, ostentatious uniforms, promotion of dreadful art and pretensions to being great writers - not to mention their terrible taste in interior decoration.

Bizarrism II collects further tales of high strangeness around the world. The cast includes an eccentric baroness, a murderous comic book artist, an obsessed ichthyologist, a celebrity stigmatic, a cannibalistic writer, a senile surgeon and a woman who tried to make atheism into a religion. Along the way, a light is shone on various religious cults, mysterious deaths are pondered, conspiracy theories probed and the fate of Napoleon's penis tracked. It's a lively, meticulously researched collection of tales that will amuse, appal and intrigue, and leave you marvelling at the infinite strangeness of human beings.

Bizarrism is a collection of strange-but-true tales, featuring a grand parade of eccentrics, visionaries, crackpots, cult leaders, artists, theorists and outsiders of every stripe. First published in 1999, this new, fully revised and expanded edition revisits a host of unique individuals, including: - William Chidley, who believed that, when it comes to sex, we've all been making a terrible mistake - Arthur Cravan, who combined poetry with boxing - Slim Gaillard, jazz singer and dispenser of 'vout' - William Lindsay Gresham, author of the classic noir novel Nightmare Alley - Rosaleen Norton, Australia's most notorious witch - Harry Crosby, poet, sun worshipper and the best looking corpse of 1929 - Reginal Levgiac, author of the mysterious pamphlet Drugs Virus Germs.