What was Pol Pot eating while two million Cambodians were dying of hunger? Did Idi Amin really eat human flesh? And why was Fidel Castro obsessed with one particular cow?
Traveling across four continents, from the ruins of Iraq to the savannahs of Kenya, Szablowski tracked down the personal chefs of five dictators known for the oppression and massacre of their own citizens — Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Uganda’s Idi Amin, Albania’s Enver Hoxha, Cuba’s Fidel Castro, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot — and listened to their stories over sweet-and-sour soup, goat-meat pilaf, bottles of rum, and games of gin rummy. Dishy, deliciously readable and dead serious,
“How to Feed a Dictator” provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.
“Amazing stories… Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table,” Lulu Garcia-Navarro wrote about the book on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday.
Szablowski graduated from the Department of Journalism and Political Science at the Warsaw University. He has also studied political science in Istanbul.
While working as an intern at CNN Türk, he visited all of Turkey.
He began his journalistic career with TVN24, one of the leading news channels of Poland. In 2006 he began working for “Gazeta Wyborcza” and its weekly supplement “Duzy Format”, becoming the youngest reporter in its team. He worked there until 2016.
Since 2018 he has been associated with “Dzien dobry TVN”, a Polish morning show broadcast. Since April 2019 on Newonce Radio he runs his radio show about traveling.