A brotherhood of Tyrants

by D. Jablow Hershman

Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin were three tyrants, the effects of whose brutal regimes are still with us. Each attained absolute power, and misused it in a gargantuan fashion, leaving in his wake a trail of hatred, devastation, and death. This remarkable study, while it examines the private and public lives of these three megalomaniacal leaders, is neither history nor biography. Rather, it takes the reader into the terra incognita of relationships between the strange lives of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin and the ferocious, bizarre political systems they established. In A Brotherhood of Tyrants, D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb uncover manic depression as a hidden cause of dictatorship, war, and mass killing. Comparing Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin, they describe a number of behavioral similarities supporting the contention that a specific psychiatric disorder - manic depression - can be one of the key factors in a political pathology such as tyranny. Combining fam