Artan R. Hoxha’s biography ‘Enver Hoxha’ is a plodding portrait of a Marxist tyrant

“Albanianism,” wrote the 19th-century poet Pashko Vasa, was his country’s one true faith. Not many outsiders will get the reference, but Albania’s troubled history seems to have produced a particularly rugged and enduring national identity. British pop star Dua Lipa once incited a minor social media furor by posting a map of “Greater Albania” that included large chunks of the country’s neighbors. Lipa was born in Britain, but her parents are ethnic Albanians. Loyalty to the mother country evidently runs deep.

From the end of World War II to 1985, the Albanian strongman Enver Hoxha simultaneously cultivated and profited from this national siege mentality. Originally a protege of Tito and Stalin, Hoxha developed a unique (and uniquely dysfunctional) brand of Albanian Marxism to cement his one-man rule. In so doing, he created a European hermit kingdom, the closest the continent has ever gotten to modern North Korea. The story of Hoxha’s