Lulu Garcia-Navarro at NPR:
In the new book How to Feed a Dictator, journalist Witold Szablowski tracks down the chefs who served these five men, to paint intimate portraits of how they were at home and at the table.
“When I read about Pol Pot, when I was researching for the book, I read somewhere that he liked the heart of cobra,” Szablowski says. “So I felt like this is the very dictatorship-ish story. But then I went to the chef and she told me that it never happened. He didn’t like the snakes, like, he was eating chicken and fish.”
The chefs were complex characters, he adds. “Sometimes they are very easy to like, but sometimes they are very easy to hate. Like, they are not easy characters, because it wasn’t an easy job.”
More here.