Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

"It's a persuasive case, though the decision to leave leftist strongmen largely out of her study leaves Ben-Ghiat open to charges of political bias."

"She has a gift for bringing together details that are both poignant and startling, laying them out with particular aplomb when delving into the orgiastic misdirection of funds into authoritarian coffers ...The book was written and released before the 2020 election was decided, but Ben-Ghiat's description of the end days of strongman rule fits, with eerie precision, Trump's erratic, bellicose final weeks in office."

"She also argues, more originally but less persuasively, that they flaunt a fourth trait, 'virility,' manifested in acts such as Trump's boasting of his sexual exploits to Access Hollywood and Putin's posing shirtless for photos."

"In [one] view, rather than a by-product of global and American racist, populist, and fascist traditions reformulated in postfascist anti-democratic ways, Trumpism can be easily bracketed and summarily dismissed ..."

"Essential for all collections."

"Many readers can well live without Ben-Ghiat's explicit disclosure that Mussolini and Gaddafi each had sex addictions, though even the prudes among us might find it intriguing to learn that Mussolini fathered about 20 children, that his first wife ended up in a mental institution, and that he had a son he caused to be murdered by lethal injection ..."