Witold Szablowski has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4★ across 10 ratings. The most-rated is How to Feed a Dictator.
How to Feed a Dictator
Summary
“Amazing stories.... Intimate portraits of how [these five ruthless leaders] were at home and at the table.” (Lulu Garcia-Navarro, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday) Anthony Bourdain meets Kapuscinski in this chilling look from within the kitchen at the appetites of five of the 20th century's most infamous dictators, by the acclaimed author of Dancing Bears. 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, Witold 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 listenable, and dead serious, How to Feed a Dictator provides a knife’s-edge view of life under tyranny.
©2020 Witold Szablowski; Antonia Lloyd-Jones - translation (P)2020 Penguin Audio
Dancing Bears
Summary
For hundreds of years, Bulgarian Gypsies trained bears to dance, welcoming them into their families and taking them on the road to perform. In the early 2000s, with the fall of Communism, they were forced to release the bears into a wildlife refuge. But even today, whenever the bears see a human, they still get up on their hind legs to dance. In the tradition of Ryszard Kapus´cin´ski, award-winning Polish journalist, Witold Szablowski uncovers remarkable stories of people throughout Eastern Europe and in Cuba who, like Bulgaria’s dancing bears, are now free but who seem nostalgic for the time when they were not. His on-the-ground accounts provide a fascinating portrait of social and economic upheaval and a lesson in the challenges of freedom and the seductions of authoritarian rule.
©2018 Witold Szablowski, Antonia Lloyd-Jones (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.