In poor taste all around

The handsome dust jacket and the oddity of subject make this book seem intriguing at first. There’s not a lot out there on despot decor -- an inside look at the homes of the world’s most rich and vicious.

It’s a high concept, based on the fact that dictators, by definition, don’t have to ask for what they want. They just take it. With the ability to command slave labor, and with massive amounts of stolen cash, you might think a few of them would have opted for great architecture, or acquired fine art, or at least furnished with some kind of international elan. This volume promises to prove the exact opposite: that “absolute power corrupts absolutely, right down to the drapes.”

It’s an attempt at humor, which ultimately fails. What it proves in the author’s snide essays is that dictators don’t come from the ruling class. Most start from desperate beginnings and come to desperate ends. In between, they murder at will, claw for power and elude assassination attempts. They don’t just have bad taste. They have no taste. When and where would they acquire it from?

Worse yet for the author, dictators have never liked photos taken of the interiors of their homes. They don’t even have real homes, as most people define the word. They have multiple “showplace” dwellings, but settle in none. That would be too dangerous.

So what we get here is a sparse photo catalog of the totally tacky, ostentatious and mostly public rooms of 16 despots, from Hitler to Hussein, all of which divulges little of their personal lives or of private moments spent in chambers not meant for public display.

British author Peter York, described on the jacket as a “renowned author” and “style guru,” writes as if looking through his monocle and down his aristocratic nose at this riff-raff who evidence not the tiniest touch of class. In each essay, however, he vaguely alludes to atrocities his subjects visited on the human race. And atrocities of style don’t bear mention in comparison.

-- Bettijane Levine