A panel discussion with author Witold Szabłowski on his book, How to Feed a Dictator: Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Enver Hoxha, Fidel Castro, and Pol Pot through the Eyes of Their Cooks.
With Panelists:
Witold Szabłowski
Laura Shapiro
Ruth Reichl
Krishnendu Ray
Bill Buford
Moderator:
Larry Wolff
Co-Sponsored by NYU Remarque Institute, NYU DC Dialogues, & The NYU Eastern Europe Workshop
Panelist Biographies
Witold Szabłowski is a Polish journalist, who has worked in print journalism with Gazeta Wyborcza and for Polish television, and has been honored by Amnesty International for his human rights journalism. He is the author of The Assassin from Apricot City (2010) about Turkey, Dancing Bears (2014) about Central Europe, and Righteous Traitors: Neighbors from Volhynia (2016) about Polish-Ukrainian relations. His latest book, How to Feed a Dictator, was published in Polish in 2019 and in English (with Penguin) in 2020.
Bill Buford is a chef and journalist, formerly the editor of Granta and fiction editor at the New Yorker. He is the author of Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (2006) and Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking (2020).
Laura Shapiro is a food writer, food journalist, and food historian. She is the author of What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells their Stories (2017), as well as Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986), Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (2004), and Julia Child: A Life (2007).
Ruth Reichl, who has been the restaurant critic of the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times and was the last editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, is the author of the classic food memoirs Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998), Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table (2001), Garlic and Sapphires: The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise (2005), and, most recently, Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019).
Krishendu Ray is a sociologist and the chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU Steinhardt, and the author of The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (2004) and The Ethnic Restaurateur (2016).
Larry Wolff is Silver Professor of European History at NYU, executive director of the Remarque Institute, and Co-Director of NYU Florence. His books include The Vatican and Poland in the Age of the Partitions (1988), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), The Idea of Galicia: History and Fantasy in Habsburg Political Culture (2010), and, most recently, Woodrow Wilson and the Reimagining of Eastern Europe (2020).
