Fascism by Madeleine Albright

THOMAS EDISON HAILED HIM AS THE "GENIUS OF THE MODERN age"; Gandhi, as a "superman. " Winston Churchill pledged to stand by him in his "struggle against the bestial appetites of Leninism. " Newspapers in Rome, host to the Vatican, referred to him as "the incarnation of God. " In the end, people who had worshipped his every move hung his corpse upside down next to his mistress's near a gas station in Milan.

Benito Mussolini was ushered into the world in Predappio, a small farming town forty miles northeast of Florence, in 1883. His father was a blacksmith and a Socialist, his mother a teacher and devout. He grew up in a two-room cottage attached to the one-room school where his mother taught. His family was comfortable but unable to afford full tuition at the priest-run boarding academy that he began attending at age nine. There, during meals, the wealthier students were assigned to one table, Benito and his companions to another-an indignity that kindled in Mussolini a lifelong rage against injustice (to him). The boy was full of mischief, often pilfering fruit from farmers and getting into fights. At eleven he was expelled for stabbing a fellow pupil in the hand, and at fifteen he was suspended for knifing a second classmate in the buttocks.