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| King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa | 
| Author: Adam Hochschild
Publisher: Mariner Books
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
Buy Used: $3.09
You Save: $11.91 (79%)
New (52) Collectible (2) from $5.91
Avg. Customer Rating:  186 reviews
Sales Rank: 2712
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 1
ISBN: 0618001905
Dewey Decimal Number: 967.51022
UPC: 046442001908
EAN: 9780618001903
ASIN: 0618001905
Publication Date: October 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: **Books may NOT include Online Access Codes (InfoTrac, MyEconLab).** Books MAY contain highlighting, writing, and/or bent pages. We ship M - F.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Great Remembering January 13, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
To understand what is happening in Africa today, we have to have some knowledge of its past. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to learn about the events which helped to shape Central Africa and by extension much of the rest of colonial Africa. Do not be misled by the tiny handful of negative reviews. The author has painstakingly researched the subject and provides ample documentation to back up this extremely well-written book.
great overview January 8, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
this represents a great, balanced overview of the congo situation 1890 to 1910, with good benchmarks to other human disasters, e.g. other african oppression, Hitler / Jews, etc. This effort could easily have devolved into the melodramatic, but thankfully stays professional . . . easy to read...strong prose, well edited.
The other side of the White Man's Burden October 14, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
Not since Joseph Conrad's "The Heart of Darkness" have we seen the cold-blooded truth about the cold-blooded atrocities that were all too commonplace during the era of "the white man's colonization of Africa." Here "the art of despotism Western style" was perfected and perhaps reached its apotheosis through the evil but almost Teutonically calculated machinations of a petty and vile King of Belgium.
Examined from inside the hermitically sealed inner chamber of horrors of a forgotten and almost unrecorded, and still seldom acknowledged 20th Century holocaust, the author lays bare -- atrocity-by-ugly-atrocity -- the moral and humanitarian horrors of the subjugation of the "Belgian Congo." It is a crime of such monumental proportions that it will forever stain the character of the entire Belgian people.
Yet, despite the fact that these horrors, in almost every respect rivaled the European holocaust committed against Jews and other "so called undesirables," until this volume, the atrocities of the Belgium Congo had remained a carefully ignored and much repressed - if not subtly rationalized and protected part of Western history.
Just as Hitler disguised the last train ride to Auschwitz as a vacation to an idyllic labor camp, so too did Leopold's henchmen -- which, as usual, included a sizable contingent of the Christian clergy - also disguised their perfidy under the cloak of "civilizing the barbaric Africans." If it does nothing else, this book finally reveals who the real savages of Africa were.
Adam Hochschild shakes the moral conscience in more than just one way: The key subtext of his book is that there is no final justice in this world. The strong, the greedy and the powerful continue to murder and otherwise ravage the earth with impunity; and then as King Leopold II did, they rewrite history to cover their crimes. Overtime, even those who know the truth are unable to come to grips with what they know and with what they have seen. In order to retain a modicum of their conscience intact, they learn that it is much healthier to pretend to forget. Otherwise, how else can they sit idly by and watch the dead rest peacefully, when the unremitting Christian-backed moral hell on earth continue to rage unabated above their heads?
The other subtext is equally chilling: This revelation gives a whole new meaning to Rudyard Kipling's poem, or William Easterly's book of the same name: "The White Man's Burden." It is that the white man's greed and crimes over the past half millennium -- in the Americas, against all of Africa and most of Asia - under the guise of doing good for the less civilized -- has bequeath to us all a moral "scorched earth." All of humanity has been compromised and greatly diminished by the white man's rampant quest for his version of civilization and progress.
Now, in the aftermath of the bloodiest century in history, it is not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the white man's greed and immorality normalized under the guise of doing good for the less civilized has itself become a kind of global moral savagery that is now a burden for all the world.
Five Stars
 the heart of man is desperately wicked September 25, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you have somehow achieved sufficient literacy to read user reviews on Amazon, and still believe that people are basically good, now's your chance to read a book that will relieve you of this misconception. King Leopold's Ghost gives historical proof that there is no problem in recruiting enough people to torture, humiliate, and kill perfectly innocent Africans by the millions.
All I can say is thank God for the press and for Christian missionaries. If it hadn't been for those two institutions, the horror in Africa perpetrated by the Belgian king would have continued unabated until all of the land drained by the Congo river was stripped of all human inhabitants.
Ashes from the White Sepulcher August 16, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
A masterful work. Hochschild outlines an entire world duped by charms and charming sentiments. Millions perished while Leopold gains wealth untold. Maiming, murder, mayhem and the crooked world of Presidents, Kings and Congresses. Leopold mastery of the world stage lasted decades. Long term lessons on how governments manage what is perceived to be the gospel truth. Hochschild deserves high recognition for this introduction into the world of tycoons and titans plundering a nation in the name of Christianity. Hochschild's assessment of current Zaire affairs are disturbing. Cobalt, uranium and a host of lesser necessities available to the of best armed encampments from the native riches of this African country. The plunder continues
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