King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa At the turn of the century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a genocidal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area's population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold's Ghost is the "absorbing and horrifying account" (Los Angeles Times) of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century's first great human rights movement.
Born the son of a mining company executive, Adam Hochschild visited apartheid-era South Africa during his teens and observed the injustices of racism. He subsequently became active politically, joining the civil rights movement, demonstrating against the Vietnam War, and co-founding the activist magazine Mother Jones. His National Book Award-nominated Bury the Chains is a fascinating look at the British abolitionist movement of the late 1700s.
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