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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: $2.50
You Save: $12.50 (83%)
New (51) Collectible (2) from $5.91
Avg. Customer Rating:  186 reviews
Sales Rank: 2801
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
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| Customer Reviews:
 Wonderful February 21, 2007
3 out of 6 found this review helpful
I could not get a book like this.. Thanx for Amazon for making it available to em
 Plunder and Profit: The Rape of a Continent February 21, 2007
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
King Leopold's Ghost
I began reading Adam Hochhild's excellent "King Leopold's Ghost" shortly after reading "The Last Expedition: Stanley's Mad Journey Across Africa." The relationship between the two is clear: Stanley was King Leopold's "Go To" Guy in the unfortunately named "Congo Free State," which was neither Free nor a state.
It was open season on Africa; the European kingdoms and principalities saw the enormous economic advantages of a toehold in Africa, and wasted no time on niceties like human rights.
Some in Europe,including Arthur Conan Doyle,Roger Casement, and E.D. Morel, were appalled by Stanley's adventurism and Leopold's imperialism. An "Open Letter" from George Washington Williams, a Black American writer, surfaced which detailed the human rights abuses of the regime-- including the cutting off of hands and fingers of Rubber Plantation workers.
Another European who investigated reports of humanitarian abuses in the Congo was British Consul Roger Casement, who produced his "Report on the Congo" in 1903, detailing the brutuality of Leopold's agents, including Henry M.Stanley, who comes across as a vile tyrant. Casement's contribution to exposing the tyranny of Leopold were obscured by disclosure (presumably by Leopold's men) of his closeted homosexuality and by his own misguided allegience to Germany in the First World War.
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Just as he was portrayed in "The Last Expedition", Stanley was a self-created Legend who capitalized on public curiousity over Africa to create his own Empire.
Leopold was a skillful lobbyist who enlisted public opinion and powerful allies to perpetuate the myth of benevolent despotism in the Congo.
Just as today, when the World watches benignly while genocide is committed in Rwanda and Sudan, Europe watched while Leopold's henchmen raped the Congo.
The Sad part of this excellent history is that, once plundered by the Belgians, the Congo became yet another Prospect for exploitation by the Natives. Seems you just can't win.
Hochschild's research and bibliography are impressive. Well worth reading.
Recommended January 15, 2007
1 out of 5 found this review helpful
Well written and very informative.
It gives you a new perspective on this part of the world.
well researched and informative, great sense of narrative January 9, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The book is well written, really lets you understand the sequence of events that surrounded both the colonization of the Congo and the efforts of the many people who had worked against the regime. One of the most shocking revelations of the book is that this wasn't an isolated freakish series of events, but that the same kind of horrors were to be found elsewhere in colonial Africa, perhaps to a lesser degree, but that the Congo was simply the most publicized and well-known of them. The fact that it's almost put in as an afterthought is the one flaw of the book, but I don't think it could have the same pacing and sense of narrative if it were a real survey of 19th C colonization in Africa. It's a reminder that we need to be paranoid about people claiming good intentions for reforming a supposedly "backwards" place.
Fabulous January 5, 2007
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
Well-written, engaging, and full of fascinating details. This book reads like a novel and brilliantly brings in characters and individuals that help the reader identify with the events at hand. The focus is obviously, and unabashedly, on the worst excesses of imperialism; with that focus, however, it is scathing endictment of the way imperialism was justified for the sake of mis-directed ideas of ruthless capitalist gain. However, as an historian-in-the-making, I must recommend that this is not the only book on the subject you read. It would be a misnomer to consider all our imperial forebears to be nothing more than ruthless murderers and rapists. In the Congo, and in this story, it becomes clear enough that they existed en masse.
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