Children of Monsters

Children of Monsters: An Inquiry into the Sons and Daughters of Dictators by Jay Nordlinger, 248 pages

Children of Monsters is a fascinating study of the lives of the children (and grandchildren) of twenty of history's worst tyrants, from Mussolini to Castro.  As might be expected, none of them escaped entirely unscathed from their fathers' legacies.  As might also be expected, each lived with their legacy in a unique way.  Some became monsters (Uday Hussein, Nicu Ceausescu), others dissidents (Alina Castro, Hussein Khomeini), some few became tyrants themselves (Bashar Assad, Jean-Claude Duvalier), and at least two became jazz musicians (Romano Mussolini played piano, Taban Amin played guitar - the former performed with Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, and married Sophia Loren's sister).  As is the way of the world, irony abounds - one of Tojo's daughters married an American and settled in Honolulu, Pol Pot's daughter graduated university with a degree in accounting.

Journalist Nordlinger adopts a conversational tone which helps compensate for some of the uncertainties surrounding his subjects - as dictatorships attempt to control all information about the lives of their leaders, facts are sometimes hard to come by, and Nordlinger is continually forced to resort to words like "reportedly", "allegedly", and "apparently".  This also, intentionally or not, decreases the personal distance between author, readers, and subjects, bringing the horrors and the tragedies (as well as the more mundane triumphs) home.