The Last King of Scotland

ISBN: 0375703314

Title: The Last King of Scotland

Author: Giles Foden

KDL Description:

A bizarre accident in Uganda finds Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan appointed personal physician to infamous Ugandan leader Idi Amin and, over the next eight years, struggling with his own complicity in the dictator’s brutality and barbaric reign of terror.

Amazon Description:

Shortly after his arrival in Uganda, Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan is called to the scene of a bizarre accident: Idi Amin, careening down a dirt road in his red Maserati, has run over a cow. When Garrigan tends to Amin, the dictator, in his obsession for all things Scottish, appoints him as his personal physician. And so begins a fateful dalliance with the central African leader whose Emperor Jones-style autocracy would transform into a reign of terror.

In The Last King of Scotland Foden’s Amin is as ridiculous as he is abhorrent: a grown man who must be burped like an infant, a self-proclaimed cannibalist who, at the end of his 8 years in power, would be responsible for 300,000 deaths. And as Garrigan awakens to his patient’s baroque barbarism — and his own complicity in it — we enter a venturesome meditation on conscience, charisma, and the slow corruption of the human heart. Brilliantly written, comic and profound, The Last King of Scotland announces a major new talent.