Confronting Evil: Assessing the Worst of the Worst argues that evil isn’t abstract—it is embodied in specific people, decisions, and systems, and we must name it, study it, and act against it with moral clarity. Confronting Evil is a brisk, moral history that asks readers to look squarely at the “worst of the worst.”
The book’s case studies move from ancient Rome to modern Russia, from Genghis Khan’s massacres to Mao Zedong’s engineered famines, from Henry VIII’s palace plots to cartel cathedrals in the Sierra Madre, and from the Roman cryptoporticus to the October 7 attack at Kibbutz Be’eri. The narrative is punctuated by primary-source scenes and crisp historical synthesis; e.g., the prologue’s stark line—“The killer has arrived”—introduces Hamas gunmen at Be’eri (Prologue, Oct. 7, 2023) , while the Caligula chapter cites the emperor calling tortured victims’ screams “a great appetizer” .
Where statistics matter, O’Reilly and Hammer attach big numbers and judgments (e.g., Mao as “the worst mass killer in history” at ~80 million deaths) and connect them to readable scenes.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Confronting Evil is best for readers who want a fast, scene-driven tour of history’s darkest actors told with a journalist’s eye and a prosecutor’s summation. It’s not for those seeking an ideologically neutral historiography or long-form archival debates—the voice is forthright and the judgments are clear.
I came to Confronting Evil with skepticism, because shelves are full of “worst people ever” compendiums that recycle sensational stories.
But from its prologue at Be’eri—“The killer has arrived”—to the final judgments on modern tyrants and transnational cartels, the book’s thematic spine is surprisingly rigorous: name evil precisely, show how it scales, and remind readers that moral clarity is not simplistic, it’s necessary.
Crucially, the authors stitch vignettes into a single claim: understanding how evil people think (and how their systems function) is a prerequisite for confronting them in time.
We are not dealing with boogeymen.
We’re dealing with leaders and networks who choose—again and again—to make others suffer.
And, as the book repeats in different registers, evil is rarely shy about announcing itself.
Context. The genre is narrative history and reportage with a prosecutorial tone: short, cinematic scenes; tight historical sketches; strong theses; and unambiguous verdicts. Josh Hammer, O’Reilly’s coauthor, is a Newsweek senior editor-at-large and syndicated columnist, which helps explain the book’s brisk editorial voice.
Purpose. The central thesis is that evil is a choice made by identifiable people who pursue domination through terror—so the duty of a free public is to recognize it early and confront it.
That throughline links Rome’s cryptoporticus to modern missile salvos; in the book’s modern sections, for example, the authors refer to civilian devastation in Ukraine and lay personal responsibility at Vladimir Putin’s feet (“One man is responsible”) , a claim that aligns with UN monitoring of surging civilian casualties in 2024–2025.
2. Background
Because “evil” is a loaded word, the book takes pains to de-abstract it through scenes rather than treatises.
The prologue at Kibbutz Be’eri is characteristic: within three lines (“The killer has arrived”), the book locates a commander, a unit, a motive, and the target: civilians.
Public reporting corroborates the Be’eri massacre toll (about 132 killed, including residents and defenders).
Likewise, the Rome sections stress the cascade effect of a single despot’s will—Caligula’s reign deepens impoverishment even in a city of a million, with “eighty percent” living in “abject poverty,” a number the authors deploy to show how moral rot bleeds into civic collapse.
The background pattern is the same across eras: violent agency + institutional capture → social degradation, whether we’re looking at Mongol tumens ordered to “personally slaughter three hundred people” at Merv or Mao’s industrialized cruelty and famine management at continental scale.
3. Confronting Evil Summary
1. Caligula
O’Reilly and Hammer frame Caligula’s Rome as a case study in how one ruler’s appetites can metastasize into civic ruin.
The narrative builds to the assassination in the cryptoporticus, where a Praetorian gives the signal—“‘Jupiter!’—a code word that means it is time to murder Caligula.” This crisp stage direction is the chapter’s hinge: moral disorder at the top inevitably produces a violent correction below.
What makes the portrait memorable is the authors’ dashboard of collapse: Caligula’s reign is paired with empty treasuries, shortened life spans, and cascading insecurity. The book’s broader Rome section renders the long tail in blunt numbers: “Vast sections lie in ruin; the overall population is reduced from one million under Caligula to less than fifty thousand… The Roman Empire is ended… The Dark Ages have arrived.”
The stat is shocking by design—it compresses centuries of corrosion into an emblem of consequences, implying that unchecked spectacle-tyranny hollows states until they cave.
Stylistically, the chapter toggles between close-up cruelty and long-view demography, showing how personal depravity—mock trials, public humiliations, predation—becomes policy by inertia.
The authors’ thesis is not “ancient gossip”; it is causality: an emperor who turns pain into entertainment incubates famine, plague, and political murder as governing habits.
Thus the conspirators’ knife-work is both a crime and a verdict. Read this as a template: when statecraft is swallowed by appetite, institutions become props; and when institutions become props, collapse ceases to be an “if” and becomes a “when.”
2. Genghis Khan
This chapter pivots from theatrical cruelty to administrated annihilation. The sack of Merv is the anchor: Genghis does not merely order a massacre; he industrializes it with a performance metric—“each warrior is to personally slaughter three hundred people. Those who fail to meet that threshold will be put to death.”
In one instruction, murder becomes a quota, and soldiers become line workers on a killing floor.
The authors counterpoint the city’s two-square-mile urban life—bazaars, mosques, minarets—with the blunt arithmetic of conquest, reminding us that what vanishes are not just bodies but networks of trade, worship, and memory. They further trace the Khan’s origin myth (Temujin’s birth omen, exile, survival skills) to illuminate a ruthlessness forged in scarcity and clan violence—suggesting that the empire’s later logistics (tumens, mobility, subordination) were the codified instincts of a life begun on the knife’s edge.
While the chapter’s most arresting statistic about total Mongol lethality appears elsewhere in the book’s synthesis, the Merv episode is sufficient to show the machinery: centralized will + standardized orders + measurable thresholds → extermination at scale.
The deeper lesson is methodological: evil is easier when you can count it. By converting atrocity into a solvable task (“300 each”), the Khan’s command divorces the act from conscience and fuses obedience to survival. That is how a city dies in an afternoon and a legend is born for centuries.
3. Henry VIII
The Henry chapters dramatize how a monarch’s paranoia can weaponize law, scripture, and pageantry. After battlefield losses and fiscal collapse, Henry directs a purge: “Anyone critical of his regime is charged with three crimes: heresy, treason, and denial of his royal supremacy… In a matter of days, twenty thousand people are killed.”
The Archbishop’s cited verse—“Utterly destroy… Slay both man, woman, infant, and suckling”—reveals how sacred rhetoric is drafted to sanctify slaughter.
In parallel, the book unspools a conspiracy led by Henry Courtenay. Ciphered letters, invisible ink, and Vatican promises build toward a coup that never lands—because a single mistake exposes the plot. Arrests cascade; executions follow. A stark scene shows the Marquess praying as he is dragged to the scaffold; “six men and three women are killed that day.”
The personalization of rule produces personalized justice: the king is the law, so enemies die as theater.
This is evil in velvet and parchment: warrants, councils, and scripture launder what is essentially fear management.
The authors’ human detail—Jane Seymour’s deathbed (“I have been a faithful wife. God accept my soul”), the king’s purpled legs, the wheeled chair—keeps the horror grounded in rooms, bodies, and signatures. Policy here is intimate: the crown’s moods ricochet into the lives of actors, teachers, Catholics—entire communities bent beneath a royal appetite for control.
4. The Slavers off the Coast of New Orleans, Louisiana
This chapter forces the reader to confront slavery not as abstraction but as logistics, profit, and premeditated cruelty.
We move from the New Orleans Exchange—“a long brick building…an auction block where men, women, and children were sold” —to the supply chain that fed it. The book spotlights Franklin & Armfield, the nation’s most notorious slave-trading firm, which “built a vast operation” to source people from the Upper South and funnel them to Gulf ports .
The maritime leg is as chilling as the market: captains are introduced not as sailors but as logisticians of human cargo—“Captain Niles…unloads shackled prisoners onto the wharf” . O’Reilly and Hammer puncture any lingering myth that traders were “just men of their times,” showing deliberate family separation—“children are torn from their mothers” —and psychological terror that sometimes drove parents to despair and suicide .
The New Orleans waterfront becomes a moral stage where ordinary civic life walks past extraordinary evil.
By focusing on named firms, specific ships, and ordinary workdays organized around extraordinary crimes, the authors illustrate that slavery’s engine was modern commerce. The chapter’s argument is quiet but devastating: atrocity scaled because it was professionalized—timed sailings, tallies, credit ledgers, and managers who knew exactly what they were doing.
That bureaucratic normalcy, more than sadism alone, is what made the system so efficient—and so unforgivable.
5. Nathan Bedford Forrest and the Ku Klux Klan
The Forrest chapter is a study in charisma bent to terrible ends. From his cavalry brilliance to his postwar infamy, the authors frame Forrest as a man who could summon violence with a phrase. His own battle cry—“War, to the knife and the knife to the hilt!”—is presented as ethos, not metaphor .
The narrative centers on Fort Pillow, where Black Union troops were massacred after surrender; the text calls it what it was: “wounded men are executed where they lay” . Reconstruction does not unwind Forrest’s violence; it remobilizes it.
In dimly lit rooms the Klan takes shape—“hooded riders appear at night,” using beatings, arson, and murder to suppress Black political power .
The authors acknowledge Forrest’s late-life gestures toward distancing himself, but they weigh those words against the infrastructure of terror his legend enabled. The lasting point is structural: racial order after Appomattox was not an accident but an organized project, and Forrest’s gifts—mobility, logistics, psychological warfare—translated from the battlefield to the ballot box by other means.
The chapter leaves little doubt that the Klan’s early potency rested on men like Forrest, who understood how spectacle and rumor could govern towns as effectively as troops.
6. The Robber Barons
Here, O’Reilly and Hammer map how a small class “amass billions by controlling railroads, oil, steel, and finance” from roughly 1870 to 1910 . Rockefeller and Morgan are cast as case studies in monopoly power and political capture—“companies are purchased…competitors crushed…prices fixed” —with “workers dying in unsafe mills” while owners accumulate staggering fortunes .
The chapter doesn’t sentimentalize philanthropy; it records it—Carnegie’s cultural endowments, Rockefeller’s medical institutes—yet insists the money came from extractive practices that warped democracy.
In one sharp line the authors call these titans “evil destroyers,” a signpost of the book’s moral frame even as it relays industrial facts .
The thread that binds the portraits is systemic: vertical integration, financial trusts, and captured regulators created a self-reinforcing loop of market power. The result is an era that built the modern American economy—and a template for how concentrated capital can subordinate law, labor, and even culture to itself.
7. Joseph Stalin
Stalin’s chapter is paced like a dossier of escalating crimes. Before Hitler ever launches war, the book notes, “Stalin has killed twelve million” through purges and engineered famine .
Ukraine becomes the emblem: the Holodomor turns farmland into “a belt where cows and horses roam as human cannibals feed on the starving” . Bureaucracy is weaponized—quotas, denunciations, show trials—so that terror becomes routine.
The “Great Purge” claims “intellectuals, priests, military officers, and common citizens,” with mass executions and gulag transport emptying neighborhoods . When the USSR absorbs Eastern Europe, “another ten million” are crushed by deportations and political murder .
The authors juxtapose numbers with vignettes of families vanished by dawn knocks, insisting on the human ledgers behind the state ledgers. If there is a through-line, it is Stalin’s cold arithmetic: lives are inputs to power. The prose is unflinching because the system was—ideology lacquered over hunger, fear, and the methodical erasure of dissent.
8. Adolf Hitler
O’Reilly/Hammer don’t re-write the encyclopedic Hitler story; they aim for a devastating endgame coda.
We watch Joseph Goebbels murder his six children, then die with Magda; Heinrich Himmler poisons himself; Eichmann is finally captured and hanged. The sequence compresses fanaticism’s collapse into macabre vignettes—proof that an ideology promising destiny ends, inevitably, with corpses in basements and suicides in safehouses.
The authors then place a numerical stake in the ground: “Hitler’s twelve-year reign caused the deaths of at least forty-five million Europeans.”
The point isn’t methodological quibbling; it is moral proportion. Anchoring the catastrophe in a continental toll underscores how “ideas” can become furnaces, camps, ghettos, and scorched earth. The chapter, though brief compared to monographs, zeroes in on accountability: crimes are named; some perpetrators are hunted across decades; and a political theology of annihilation is marked as the benchmark of modern evil.
By focusing on the bitter coda rather than the full expository arc, the authors remind us that evil systems rarely die cleanly.
They leave orphans and rituals of memory, legal innovations (from Nuremberg to genocide conventions), and a long suspicion of charismatic politics. In that sense, the Hitler chapter functions as a measuring stick against which later chapters—Stalin, Mao, Khomeini, Putin—are assessed for continuity of method if not scale.
Opening with the Night of the Long Knives—“a single night of slaughter consolidates power” —the chapter moves with grim momentum toward industrial genocide.
Auschwitz functions as both place and symbol: when the Red Army arrives, “seven thousand prisoners” are found alive while “1.1 million” have been murdered there alone .
The bureaucratic language of Wannsee—minutes and memoranda—reveals how mass murder was planned in sentences: “Jews must be removed as fast as possible” from the General Government, most “unfit for work” . The chapter closes its ledger with the war’s toll—“forty-five million dead,” including “twenty million Soviets” and “six million Jews” .
The evil here is banal and operatic at once: forms and trains, yes, but also a leader who made cruelty a civic virtue.
By blending quotations with specific counts, the authors dismantle denialism and dullness alike; numbers name the scale, but voice names the intent.
9. Mao Zedong
Mao’s portrait is a study in ideology as a death engine. The authors stage an enormous public grief—“Twenty million people line the streets of Peking to pay their respects.”
Then they invert it with the verdict: “Mao Zedong is the worst mass killer in history. Under his leadership, eighty million die.” The juxtaposition is the point: massive adoration and massive mortality can coexist when propaganda saturates the air and dissent means ruin.
We also see the architecture: the First Five-Year Plan, collectivization, war on the “Five Olds,” and the ritual toasts of baijiu (“White Lightning”) in subterranean meeting rooms while slides proclaim the future at “one century every five years.”
The book toggles from slogans to prisons: bishops hauled away, churches targeted, and a culture forced to forget itself. The result is famine, purification campaigns, and a cult whose merchandise still sells: “His image appears on… T-shirts, mugs… the ‘Little Red Book’ is still in print.”
The authors’ charge is sweeping but consistent with their thesis of agency: the “state” under Mao is just a man with a party—deciding who eats, who speaks, who disappears. The aftermath—embalming under glass, souvenirs under neon—suggests that evil can fossilize into heritage unless history keeps count.
Mao’s rise is traced from a bookish Hunan youth to a movement-builder. By 1921, he’s organizing reading groups and cells; by the late 1920s “more than one million armed Communists” stand ready to challenge the Nationalists .
Civil war campaigns are rendered in blood and mud—at Shuangduiji, “three hundred thousand soldiers die” as fronts collapse and towns are razed . The chapter treats ideology as lived force: texts, rectification, and purges produce a revolutionary culture that survives setbacks. Then come the catastrophes of rule.
Citing scholarship, the book recalls the Great Leap Forward in which “more than 20 million people died,” and shows how Mao then stoked the Cultural Revolution against “moderate leaders” who had revived the economy with incentives .
The portrait is of a leader who could mobilize belief at immense human cost—someone who understood that to control history, one must first control memory, education, and the right to speak at all.
10. Ayatollah Khomeini
This chapter is paced like a political thriller. The embassy seizure yields “fifty-two US citizens… taken hostage,” and the regime discovers how spectacle can be governance. Years later, the denouement is choreographed for maximum humiliation: “As a final insult to Jimmy Carter, Khomeini releases the hostages the moment Reagan takes the oath of office.” The timing is not incidental; it is theocratic stagecraft as foreign policy.
The domestic apparatus is muscular: “one million soldiers and another 250,000” in the IRGC, with a mission explicitly defined as protecting the faith at home and abroad—an institutionalization of zeal that survives leaders. From there, the narrative tracks how humiliation of the “Great Satan,” purging of Western symbols, and sanctification of violence knit a new political theology.
The authors’ throughline is consistent: a revolutionary charisma, sanctified grievance, and paramilitary muscle can reset a nation’s moral framework in months.
The hostage saga’s lesson is less about negotiation tactics and more about the durable power of narrative: when a regime can script reality in real time, it can convert crowds into consent and insults into sovereignty.
The narrative opens at Jaleh Square, where protest becomes massacre: “Thousands of rounds…rip through…protesters, bystanders, children…hundreds of bodies lie on the ground” . From exile in France, Khomeini listens to the news—“The Ayatollah smiles: ‘Allahu Akhbar’”—and plots his return; weeks later he lands to “Millions…in the streets,” proclaiming the Islamic Republic from an airport balcony .
The Shah, secretly ill with lymphatic cancer, flees; palatial images—“Persian rugs…a gold throne”—contrast with cranes rigged for public hangings as the old order collapses .
The chapter threads terror and theology: SAVAK’s earlier repression (kidnappings, torture) yields to revolutionary tribunals and a new security state; by the late 1980s, the regime finances regional militias and brands the U.S. “the Great Satan” .
Footnoted figures give scale—the Iran-Iraq War kills an estimated “500,000 to 1.2 million” people . The authors’ judgement is stern: Khomeini channels historic grievance into a theocratic state that polices bodies and belief with equal fervor.
11. Vladimir Putin
The Putin chapter is the book’s present-tense indictment. The Christmas-Eve strike on Kharkiv is described with reporterly cadence—“Eighty rockets hit the power station. Much of Ukraine plunges into darkness.”
Numbers supply the moral perimeter: “more than fifty thousand civilians are dead… [UN] estimates… more than one hundred thousand [casualties]… Another ten million have fled.” Then the hammer: “One man is responsible.”
The chapter sketches the patronage engine—oligarchs, generals, nuclear threats—and the isolation that follows: banned from G7, a ruble in freefall, a shrinking map of safe travel. The authors’ tone is not analytic neutrality; it is moral clarity: “Vladimir Putin is an unstable individual who obviously does not value human life at all… That is a classic definition of evil.” In a book about agency, this is the modern proof: revanchism draped in history can still be named, counted, and resisted.
The sequence reminds readers that the mechanics of earlier chapters—propaganda, fear, patronage, and strategic cruelty—remain fully operable in the twenty-first century. The stakes, multiplied by missiles and reactors, are global.
Putin’s life arc—gang leader to KGB to president—is told through scenes of training, torture, and opportunism. As a young officer he’s “trained in…torture” and oversees “Zersetzung” against dissidents in Dresden; civilians are shocked, stripped, and dumped “naked into the frigid streets” after six hours of abuse .
After 1991, unemployed and embittered, he leverages city hall to build a criminal-political machine—“extort businesses…recruits…organized crime…those who oppose…are beaten, sometimes murdered” .
The chapter follows the psychology too: a childhood in a communal flat—“two hundred square feet…a small wood-burning furnace”—and a reputation as “the Rat Hunter” .
In power, he fuses state and mafia logic, and in war he escalates beyond borders. By 2024, missile barrages plunge Ukraine into darkness; “more than fifty thousand civilians are dead from starvation and deprivation…civilian casualties…more than one hundred thousand,” with ten million refugees, the book reports from UN estimates .
The authors conclude without euphemism: “Putin…does not value human life at all,” a tyrant sustained by fear, oil money, and nuclear menace .
12. The Drug Cartels
The book closes where ancient appetites meet modern logistics: a chapel in the Sierra Madre where Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán kneels before a macabre idol. The scene is intimate and operatic—“The most feared man in Mexico kneels at the altar… the demonic figure, Santa Muerte, Holy Death, is the patron saint of the drug cartels that control Mexico.”
Around him, incense and candles make murder feel ceremonial, while he prays for “blessings, safety, prosperity, power, protection” and pledges loyalty in return.
That posture is the book’s final symbol: evil sacralized, profit perfumed. The chapter refuses to leave it at ritual, though; it splices this private devotion to a public ledger of grief. In Detroit, a twenty-year-old mother inhales a tiny bag stamped with a skeletal icon—“Santa Muerte”—and dies alone under an overpass. The authors count the commerce plainly: “Throughout her short life, Francine Doermann has given El Chapo more than $40,000. That is the price of her death.” In one juxtaposition—altar to tent—the supply chain is morally mapped.
The cartels’ reach is not just chemical; it is feudal. Girls “between eleven and fifteen years old” can be abducted and displayed at poolside while local police “dare not intervene,” a line that makes governance feel like a rumor and sovereignty like a costume.
O’Reilly and Hammer end here because this is evil in its modern uniform: quasi-states that fuse liturgy, logistics, and terror. Even official language—designations that describe cartels as entities that “function… as quasi-governmental” and pose “an unacceptable national security risk”—confirms the book’s verdict that we are dealing with a rival form of rule, not merely a criminal niche.
So the epilogue’s lesson is unsentimental: you cannot reform a theology of death; you must disempower it. Name the altar, follow the money, starve the market, and insist—again—that moral clarity is not extremism; it is self-defense.
4. Confronting Evil Analysis
Did the authors support their claims with evidence and logic? Mostly—because the book stays close to verifiable events and concise statistics, and because the vivid scenes are anchored with recognizable primary-source beats (e.g., Roman assassins’ codeword “Jupiter!”) .
The modern chapters cross-reference public monitoring bodies (e.g., United Nations statements on Ukraine), which helps buttress the moral argument with contemporary data.
That said, the certainty of some totals (e.g., “eighty million” under Mao) will invite debate—historians propose ranges, and the high end can be controversial—yet the core claim that Mao’s regime inflicted unprecedented peacetime mortality is widely sustained in the literature.
The book’s method is plain: show motive, method, body count, and consequence—and judge. Readers expecting extended historiography or footnoted monographs will not find them; the trade-book format aims for moral clarity over methodological disputation.
Does the book fulfill its purpose? Yes: the chapters do what the title promises—assess the worst of the worst—and they do it in ways that are teachable. As a seminar text on moral agency and political violence, Confronting Evil works because it translates abstract ethics into memorable scenes (Caligula’s dining room, Khan’s quota of slaughter, Mao’s funeral crowds, Putin’s missiles, cartel liturgies).
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths (what worked for me): The book’s scene craft is consistently strong. The assassins’ sprint through Rome’s underworld (“cryptoporticus”), the “Jupiter!” password, and the two-minute end of the emperor—these details stick because they are cinematic and sourced.
Likewise, the authors are skilled at connecting micro to macro—from a single fentanyl overdose to cartel finance; from a Be’eri doorway to regional war; from an imperial tantrum to the Dark Ages—with the line “The Roman Empire is ended … The Dark Ages have arrived.”
I also appreciated the journalistic compression in the modern chapters: the Christmas-Eve energy grid strike in Kharkiv is described with a reporter’s eye for sequence and civilian effect.
Finally, the book’s moral vocabulary is clear without being coy: it calls things evil—and shows why—rather than dissolving into euphemism.
Weaknesses (where I wanted more): First, some numbers are presented at the upper end of scholarly ranges without a discussion of the variance—e.g., Mao’s 80 million total. The thrust is defensible (Mao’s lethality is not in doubt), but a paragraph on range estimates would serve readers who want to understand why experts disagree.
Second, the book’s accusatory clarity can shade into over-determination: when we say “One man is responsible,” we rightly emphasize agency, but systems and collaborators matter, too; reckoning with evil usually means dismantling an ecosystem as much as toppling its icon.
6. Reception, Criticism, and Influence
Trade reception has been brisk; retail listings frame it as a bestseller category entry from “the #1 bestselling history author in the world,” which maps to O’Reilly’s track record in mass-market narrative history.
Reader communities summarize the appeal and the rub: accessible storytelling and moral urgency vs. charges of oversimplification. That is, in one line, the bargain the book asks of you: do you want a swift, morally confident tour of the worst, or a slow, footnoted arbitration of every contested statistic?
On influence, I suspect this book will teach well—its scenes are memorable and modular. A teacher could pair the Be’eri prologue with UN casualty reports and survivor journalism; the Caligula chapter with Suetonius and Gibbon; the Mao chapter with Britannica/Dikötter ranges; the Mongol chapter with Persian chroniclers and modern demographic studies.
7. Comparison with Similar Works
O’Reilly’s own “Killing” series often isolates a single figure per volume; this book compresses a canon of villains into one argument. Think of it less as a “Killing X” installment and more as a moral atlas.
Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag offer forensic depth, archival debate, and regional focus; by contrast, Confronting Evil trades monographic depth for narrative reach and didactic clarity—useful for first-pass understanding, but not a substitute for specialist studies.
“Worst dictators” compendiums sometimes read like trivia; this one reads like indictment briefs—short, feverish, pointed. For classroom use, the combination actually works: start here for the case framing, then assign the deep-dive monographs to explore mechanisms (famine policy, state terror, logistics of conquest, etc.).
8. Conclusion
If you want a clear, forceful map of evil leaders and systems across 2,000 years—and you accept the trade-book’s tempo and tone—then Confronting Evil: Assessing the Worst of the Worst is for you.
General readers, undergraduate seminars, and book-club discussion groups will get the most from it; specialists will want to pair it with longer histories and archival work to test the book’s higher-end estimates and sharpen their own counter-arguments.
Either way, the authors’ core challenge lands: Evil is a choice; confronting it is, too.