"In the haunting tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioners Song, this remarkably insightful and surprisingly intimate portrait of Saddam Hussein lifts away the top layer of a dictators evil and finds complexity beneath as it invites us to take a journey with twelve young American soldiers in the summer of 2006. Trained to aggressively confront the enemy in combat, the men learn, shortly after being deployed to Iraq, that fate has assigned them...

"What makes a country fall to a dictator? How do authoritarian leaders-strongmen-capable of killing millions acquire their power? How are they able to defeat the ideal of democracy? And what can we do to make sure it doesn't happen again? By profiling five of the most notoriously ruthless dictators in history-Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Saddam Hussein-Kenneth C. Davis seeks to answer these questions, examining the...