Research Catalog

King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa / Adam Hochschild.

Title: King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in Colonial Africa / Adam Hochschild.
Author: Hochschild, Adam
Publication: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Co., 1999, c1998.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	DT655 .H63 1999x	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Lawrence, Paul R.

Description

366 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., maps, ports.; 24 cm.

Summary

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million -- all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this story alive. He knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II.

Subject

Genre/Form

Biographies
History

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 338-350) and index.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Prologue, "The traders are kidnapping our people" -- Walking into fire: "I shall not give up the chase;" The fox crosses the stream; Magnificent cake; "The treaties must grant us everything;" From Florida to Berlin; Under the Yacht Club flag; First heretic; Where there aren't no ten commandments; Meeting Mr. Kurtz; Wood that weeps; Secret society of murderers -- A king at bay: David and Goliath; Breaking into the thieves' kitchen; to flood his deeds with day; Reckoning; "Journalists won't give you receipts;" No man is a stranger; victory?; Great forgetting.

ISBN

0618001905 (pbk.)

OCLC

42769595
SCSB-11097660

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library