King Leopold's Ghost

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

 Adam Hochschild (author) 

In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian.

King Leopold's Ghost is the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.

'All the tension and drama that one would expect in a good novel' - Robert Harris, author of Fatherland

Adam Hochschild (pronunciation: ''Hoch'' as in "spoke"; ''schild'' as in "build") published his first book, "Half the Way Home" in 1986. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times called it "an extraordinarily moving portrait of the complexities and confusions of familial love . . . firmly grounded in the specifics of a particular time and place, conjuring them up with Proustian detail and affection." His "Bury the Chains" was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Two of his books, “To End All Wars” and “King Leopold’s Ghost,” have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The American Historical Association gave Hochschild its 2008 Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award for Public Service, a prize given each year to someone outside the academy who has made a significant contribution to the study of history. "Hochschild is a superb writer who makes light work of heavy subjects," wrote Jennifer Szalai in reviewing his “Rebel Cinderella” for The New York Times.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Picador
Print length ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 9781035038817
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13 x 2.6 x 19.7 cm