My Bookshelf
From the Publisher:
In the 1880's, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and largely unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed the population by ten million--all while shrewdly cultivating his international reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose this secret crime finally led to the first great international human rights movement of the 20th century in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.
King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting portrait of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply involving story of those who fought Leopold and of the explorers, missionaries, and rubber workers who witnessed the horror. With a cast of characters richer than any novelist could invent, this book will permanently inscribe these too long forgotten events on the conscience of the West.
From the Critics:
Robin Blackburn - Literary Review Magazine: This book provides a wonderfully vivid account of an episode in the modern history of Africa that was tragic and terrible.... King Leopold's Ghost is an exemplary piece of history-writing: urgent, vivid and compelling.
The Economist: To an already long list of tyrants which includes Hi-tler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, a late addition is required. 'Late' only because King Leopold II of Belgium (1835-1909) should always have been there. As 'owner' of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908 he was responsible for what Joseph Conrad once called 'the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience.' It is indeed a ghastly story of greed, lies and murder. And Adam Hochschild retells it well. 'King Leopold's Ghost' last week beat several excellent books to win the Lionel Gelber prize. . . . now the world's most important award for non-fiction. . . . Around the turn of this century in the depths of the Congo the bonds of humanity were unbound and the trappings of civilisation cast aside, releasing something diabolical which exists within us all. Mr. Hochschild conveys this particularly well.
Christian Science Monitor: This true story of the Congo is 'full of fascinating characters, intense drama, high adventure, courageous truth-telling, and splendid moral fervor. . . A work of history that reads like a novel....An enthralling story
Jeremy Harding - The New York Times Book Review: A superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa.
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times: A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.