Thugs: How History's Most Notorious Despots Transformed the World Through Terror, Tyranny, and Mass Murder - Hardcover

Halpern, Micah D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1595550739 ISBN 13: 9781595550736

Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc, 2007

Synopsis

An analysis of despotism through the ages provides biographical sketches of fifty-six of the world's worst tyrants, in a volume that describes the personal habits, tactics, and villainies of rulers from Hammurabi to Franco.

About this title

About the Author:

Micah D. Halpern, a syndicated columnist, is a frequent analyst on terrorism and the Middle East for radio and television and has appeared regularly on CBS, Fox, and MSNBC. Halpern has been invited for consultations in the White House with terror analysts and has addressed conferences sponsored by the Justice Department. His expertise as a historian was called on by PBS for their four-part series on Herod and by The History Channel for the documentary film Masada in which he also appears.

From Publishers Weekly:

Not for the faint of heart, this volume examines the lives and dreadful reigns of 56 infamous characters, both current and long gone, who shaped history with mass horror. Written in short, easy-to-digest sentences, columnist and historian Halpern fills his brief sketches with colorful, terrible details in the manner of that rare, beloved history teacher whose lectures stir rapture in a nap-prone student body. Sit-up-and-take-notice lessons include the story of jealous King Herod, who not only had his wife murdered, but pickled her in honey "to preserve her sweetness"; the dinner party of Idi Admin, who invited the families of men he had murdered to sit and eat surrounded by their relatives' decapitated heads; and the contributions Hitler made to hypothermia knowledge through heinous experiments on captive human beings (Halper notes that, with the possible exceptions of Amin and Pontius Pilate, even the "totally, purely evil" contribute some good). Readers with an interest in the more appalling side of history, and its lasting effects, will find much to appreciate here (and perhaps more to argue in the area of omissions, oversights and Halpern's assertion that "Our freedom has become a foil against their evil").
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About this edition

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson Inc
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1595550739
• ISBN 13: 9781595550736
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 350