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

Micah Halpern has written not a history but an engaging study of the nature of thugs (dictators, strongmen, autocrats, as you will) throughout history and why they so often succeed, sometimes fail, and why people continue to support them. Even Imelda Marcos and Daniel Ortega were returned to power after they were ousted, and Halpern examines this phenomenon with insight, intelligence, and humor. But if one wishes to review this book based upon the offense that one biased party took to Halpern's speech at the Heritage Foundation, and based upon the supposed lack of respect which he accorded Persian culture, and upon whether or not he accorded enough importance to the influence of Manicheanism on Christianity and Judaism, then one can take the negative comments by another reviewer here who has not even read this book at face value. Halpern is a widely respected and very engaging scholar, well liked by all, it seems, except the emerging Islamo-leftist axis. I would suggest actually reading Halpern's witty and thoughtful book or his writings at micahhalpern.com or watching the Heritage Foundation speech when next it airs on CSPAN2's Book TV. The subject matter of this work is not limited to neglecting those points about Iran and Persia which another reviewer seems to think should have been the sole content of a book on several millennia of world history. Neither Caesaer nor Saddam nor Marcos nor Mao nor Stalin nor any of subjects of the rest of this valuable book has anything to do with the land of Xerxes, Zoroaster. Likewise, if all Halpern's myriad errors are too many to list as another reviewer asserts, then perhaps that reviewer could list three? As a libertarian, a Catholic-born atheist, and an Danish-American with no connection to Halpern or Iran, I have no axe to grind here.