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May 16, 2011

Eric_W rated it:

The Belgian Congo, as Zaire and now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, were formerly called was the creation of King Leopold of Belgium who desperately wanted a colony. By the late 19th century there was little land left for the taking except in Africa and it had become obvious that taking over independent lands was neither wise nor practical. King Leopold II, King of the Belgians, was a man of enormous appetites both for land and food—he once ate two whole pheasants at a restaurant in Pari More...

5 comments like (8 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

David rated it:

Horrifying story, rivetingly told. Regrettably, much of my reading of history has been centered primarily on the history of Europe and of the U.S. Hochschild's account of Belgium's exploitation of the Congo left me appalled. Despite the accounts of some truly savage atrocities, I ended up reading it in a couple of marathon sittings. A disturbing book, but one so well-written, I highly recommend it.

1 comment like (9 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Rashmi rated it:

This book took me several months to read because it was so disturbing. After reading a chapter and having nightmares, I'd put it away for something else, and then return to it once I'd finished with the other book.

The atrocities committed in the Belgian Congo were nothing short of diabolical. And yet, shockingly, one of the worst genocides of the twentieth century remains relatively unheard of.

I am a big fan of Adam Hochschild; he makes you feel like you're reading a nove More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 01, 2008

Chris rated it:

A profoundly disturbing account of one of the modern era's forgotten atrocities. The book is written with great empathy yet manages to eschew pity or melodrama, a balance that highlights the horrific, tragic tale of King Leopold's colonization and rape of the Congo. An unnerving reminder of man's inhumanity to man, and how the 20th century was built upon the corpses of tens of millions of African natives.

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Jan 09, 2009

Leslie rated it:

This book is a thorough, brutal, historical account of the Congo State as formed by the King of Belgium in the nineteenth century. The author is clear about where historical knowledge of the time is lacking, whose voices are noticeably missing from the account, and where his own commentary and speculation begins and ends. It's not only your "historical vegetables," or a "should read" book, it's an enjoyable read, as long as the reader does not mind being immersed in horrific More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Jul 05, 2011

Karen rated it:

I had 2 interesting experiences relating to this book while I was reading it. First, I recieved a call from an Airmiles rep who spoke with a thick African accent, he had no difficulty spelling my last name. He told me he came from the Congo, previously a Belgian colony where many names start with "van", hence his ease with my name. After telling him I was reading "King Leopold's Ghost", we talked for quite some time about the state of his homeland. He remarked that the people More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jan 18, 2012

Harmonybites rated it:

If you ask an educated American to name the worst despots and atrocities of the twentieth century, you'll immediately hear such names as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. Very few would name Leopold II, King of the Belgians and absolute master of the Belgian Congo. I wouldn't have before reading this book, yet a man thousands of miles from a land he never visited is charged with instituting policies responsible for 10 million deaths in the course of a couple of decades, sparking the "first g More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 18, 2011

Lady rated it:

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0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 13, 2008

George Bradford rated it:

The century that gave us Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Chairman Mao and Pol Pot was ushered in by the worst criminal of them all: King Leopold II of Belgium. That's right, BELGIUM!!! For all the evil perpetrated by the 'A-List A-holes of the 20th Century', none of them outdid King Leopold II.

Between 1885 and 1908, under King Leopold II's rule, an estimated 10 to 13 Million human beings were killed in the African Congo. Those Congolese who survived were tortured, maimed, raped, forc More...

2 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 31, 2008

Renee rated it:

King Leopold's Ghost is much more than a historical account of the forgotten atrocities perpetuated on the Congolese people. It is nothing less than an epic tale centred around a colonial monster and the brave men and women who fought against him.

Far from being a dry scholarly examination of African history Hochschild brings to life the complex characters who supported and opposed Leopold's Congo.

Hochschild follows the story of the Congo from pre-European contact to its d More...

4 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 02, 2010

GWC rated it:

A colonial morality play. The story in "King Leopold's Ghost" is a powerful one -- colonization taken to its extreme -- but the book is rendered mediocre by the author's trite moralizing, lack of historical rigor, and tiresome reliance on depicting every actor with either a halo or horns. Leopold, here an antagonist of extraordinary guile, is only weakly connected to the governmental and business interests with which he worked; the reader is given pages of anecdote concerning the kin More...

3 comments like (1 person liked it)

Dec 23, 2009

Nicholas added it

"http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1347740.html[return][return]More or less by coincidence, this is the second book about Congo that I have read this month. This is the story of an earlier era, of the awful exploitation, rape and murder of vast numbers of Africans under the personal supervision of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Hochschild admits that precise figures are difficult to establish with confidence, but it seems pretty clear that ten million people, half of the population, were kil More...

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Jan 25, 2009

Matt rated it:

Favorite passages:

The white men who passed through the territory as military officers, steamboat captains, or state or concession company officials generally accepted the use of the chicotte as unthinkingly as hundreds of thousands of other men in uniform would accept their assignments, a half-century later, to staff the Nazi and Soviet concentration camps. "Monsters exist," wrote Primo Levi of his experience at Auschwitz. "But they are too few in number to be truly da More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Jan 19, 2009

Jonathan rated it:

An easily digestible story that reads like fiction of King Leopold's activities in the Congo around around the turn of the 20th century. The book is far less dense than works like the Scramble for Africa and focuses around King Leopold and the Congo, rather than the whole of Africa. The writing style makes it much more engaging than other books I have read on this time period.

An incredibly important and under taught subject, this book describes the forced slave labor that took place More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 09, 2012

Robert rated it:

Ohhh, had I read this when it was published in 1998, my teaching of Conrad's novella, "Heart of Darkness" and Achebe's "Things Fall Apart" would have been more passionate and clearer in purpose. Hochschild's extensive research powerfully combines with his narrative to form a book that trembles like a volcano in my hands. He exposes the 40 years of greed and terror foisted on the civilized people of Congo. Europeans and Leopold's Belgians were oblivious to their king's sadis More...

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Jan 04, 2012

Anne rated it:

A really interesting and well-written history of colonization in the current DRC. Trying to tell the untold story is always difficult, never mind when the majority of available records paint a very biased view of the situation. In this case, I suppose both sides had published records, but one had much better PR savvy and that's skewed the historiography quite a bit.

It's interesting...I know a few people who have worked in the DRC, and from their stories about what a shit show it is t More...

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Dec 30, 2011

Al rated it:

Ever since a chance event when I was a teenager, I've had a strong interest in Africa. My interest has centered around people and politics rather than animals or natives. Because of that interest, I even had the opportunity to visit South Africa a dozen years ago. Also because of that interest, I've read a few books on the continent, too. I'd had this one on the bedside table and the bookshelves in my bedroom for a couple years but never got to it until I had it on Kindle.

I've talked More...

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May 30, 2011

Don rated it:

Personal Background

For most of my life I haven't thought much about Belgium, either positively or negatively. Their beer is pretty tasty and there was a certain sympathy about the country being used as an invasion route by the Germans in two World Wars. The European Union is based there. But I didn’t know much more than that.

As Adam Hochschild describes in “King Leopold’s Ghost”, however, there were hints of something unsavory that wasn’t widely discussed. I remember being at More...

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Mar 30, 2011

Jane rated it:

What a great job Hochschild does with the incredibly terrible tale of the mistreatment of people native to the Belgian Congo area of Africa. By developing specific characters: Henry Stanley Morton ("Dr. Livingston, I presume"), King Leopold himself, George Washington Williams, George Shepard, and the book's "heroes" Roger Casement and Edward Morel, Hochschild transforms the overpowering saga of cruelty into a narrative that, though bone-chilling, one can digest.

T More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 08, 2011

Frank rated it:

The first part of this book is just amazing. The story of how the Belgian King Leopold II used the British/American explorer Henry Morton Stanley to chart the Congo river and surreptitiously claim large swaths of the surrounding countryside in the early 1880s is almost hard to believe. By first using strange front organizations like the "International Association of the Congo" and the "International African Association" (the latter of which was actually a ivory-gathering co More...

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Dec 19, 2010

Gwen rated it:

Not surprisingly, reading about Africa is a bit ore grim than reading about other parts of the world (Galapagos, anyone?). It's rather astonishing that one person (Leopold, king of Belgium) could literally own a country (Congo) as personal property --and be savvy enough to keep much of the details, financial and otherwise, obscured, hidden, obfuscated and not visible to a)his country (which loaded him not insubstantial amounts of money for it), b)other countries (Britain, missionaries, other pe More...

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Dec 09, 2010

Riley rated it:

I was unaware of the horrors in the Congo under Belgian King Leopold II, or the fact they inspired Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I appreciated the author's repeated nods to how history is told by the victors, and not the vanquished:

"In all of Africa, the colonizers wrote the school textbooks; together with widespread book-banning and press censorship, this accomplished the act of forgetting for the written record. In the Congo, throughout the half-century of Belgian rule th More...

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Nov 18, 2010

Aaron rated it:

Excellent, readable overview of King Leopold II's colonial designs on the Congo, and the reaction against him. Adam Hochschild writes with a firm, but not overbearing, moralistic tone. It is an astonishing story of man's ability to both bring about and ignore the suffering of his fellow man.

Hochschild writes about the "chicote" -- a brutal hippo-leather whip employed by the slave-masters of the Congo to drive slaves past the point of exhaustion. By rewarding his field agents More...

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Nov 04, 2010

Michael rated it:

I can't really say I recommend this book, because the content is so unpleasant. But i picked it up to flip through it (I was staying in Hochschild's family home, which is now a writing residency) and ended up speeding through it in just a couple of days. If you do the math there, you can see how I was also using it as a procrastination device for my writing. I did not know much about this history before I started, just the impression you get from reading "Heart of Darkness." Hochschild More...

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Sep 03, 2010

Jessica rated it:

This non-fiction book tracks down and exposes King Leopold of Belgian and his horrifying treatment of the peoples of the Congo. His desire for ivory and then the discovery of rubber lead to the decimation of half the population of the Congo. Hochschild exposes atrocities that are so terrible that at times it seems unreal and many times is difficult to read about. He also sheds light on the first human rights movement that was created to fight against the conditions of the colonized. The men a More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 08, 2010

Meg rated it:

At the end of this book Hochschild reports how the atrocities in the Congo were systematically "forgotten". I believe that in order to understand what is going on today, we need to understand the past. We need to know even the most painful parts of the past. The subtitle: "A story of greed, terror and heroism in Colonial Africa" is accurate. It is the heroism that gets the reader through. While there were many horrific accounts of what went on in the Congo, there are also More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 07, 2010

Kurt rated it:

This is the story of a holocaust throughout a huge region in Africa. An estimated 10 million people died as a result of the colonial exploitation of the Congolese people between 1885 and 1905. During that time the native population of the Congo decreased by 50 percent.

The most important lesson to be learned from this history is the fact that this atrocity, which rivals or exceeds the holocausts and genocides of Hitler and Stalin, really happened, even though very few people today a More...

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Jul 23, 2010

Badly Drawn Girl rated it:

This book should be required reading for all. Adam Hochschild tackles an enormous topic, and makes it manageable. This is not a dry recounting of dusty facts and statistics but a thrilling, disturbing, and fascinating look at King Leopold, the Congo, and the various players on both sides. Never did the story drag, nor did my attention wander. But it was a tough book to read because it is so upsetting. I've spent a long time reading this because I had to break it down into smaller sess More...

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Feb 11, 2010

Jean rated it:

An expose of how a whole country was " created" and became the private fiefdom of a king. He made millions by running an extremely effetive terror regime which turned the newly called congolese into serfs. First by making them build the railway around the rapids on thecongo. Secondily by demanding payment in ivory for the return of female folk as hostages and thirdly when rubber became marketable. Rubber buckets ,one interesting but horrendous fact is that in order t More...

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Oct 26, 2011

Lizixer rated it:

When I was at school, the history of imperialism seemed to consist of the black hole of Calcutta and how Gandhi managed to persuade the British to leave India. Of the scramble for Africa and the king of the Belgians, the text books were strangely quiet. Even now, familiar as we are with the horrors of the Nazi regime under Hitler, the Japanese march through Asia bringing death to thousands, Stalinist and Maoist nightmares waged upon their own people or genocides waged in modern times in African More...

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