Adam Hochschild

"An enthralling story . . . A work of history that reads like a novel." — Christian Science Monitor “As Hochschild’s brilliant book demonstrates, the great Congo scandal prefigured our own times . . . This book must be read and reread.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review In the late nineteenth century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area’s population by ten million, he still managed to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold’s Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century’s first great human rights movement. A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Notable Book

A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

King Leopold's Ghost

Presents a history of World War I, focusing on the moral conflict between the proponents of the war and its critics in Great Britain.

A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918

To End All Wars

Offers an account of the first great human rights crusade, which originated in England in the 1780s and resulted in the freeing of hundreds of thousands of slaves around the world.

Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves

Bury the Chains

A sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through nine American and British characters including Hemingway and George Orwell. It was a war between fascism, communism, and democracy that preceeded World War II, and atale of idealism and a noble cause that failed."

Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939

Spain in Our Hearts

Joe Sacco

Describes the battle on the first day of World War I, which saw 20,000 British soldiers killed and another 40,000 injured, on the banks of the French river as they mounted a joint offensive against the German army. 30,000 first printing.

July 1, 1916 : the First Day of the Battle of the Somme : an Illustrated Panorama

The Great War

Rose Pastor arrived in New York City in 1903, a Jewish refugee from Russia who had worked in cigar factories since the age of eleven. Two years later, she captured headlines across the globe when she married James Graham Phelps Stokes, scion of one of the legendary 400 families of New York high society. Together, this unusual couple joined the burgeoning Socialist Party and, over the next dozen years, moved among the liveliest group of activists and dreamers this country has ever seen. Their friends and houseguests included Emma Goldman, Big Bill Haywood, Eugene V. Debs, John Reed, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Rose stirred audiences to tears and led strikes of restaurant waiters and garment workers. She campaigned alongside the country's earliest feminists to publicly defy laws against distributing information about birth control, earning her notoriety as "one of the dangerous influences of the country" from President Woodrow Wilson. But in a way no one foresaw, her too-short life would end in the same abject poverty with which it began.

From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes

Rebel Cinderella

Explores how Russians--prison survivors, historians, concentration camp guards, and others--are healing the wounds inflicted by long-repressed memories of the former leader and recounts the efforts of many to locate or find out what happened to relatives who disappeared during Stalin's tyrannical tenure. Reprint.

Russians Remember Stalin

The Unquiet Ghost

WINNER OF THE 1999 DUFF COOPER PRIZE. 'Brilliant .. this book must be read and re-read' Neal Ascherson'. 'A hundred years ago, enlightened people in the western world were outraged by a holocaust in Africa which left millions dead. Denunciations thundered from speaker's platforms around the US and Europe. One open letter to The Times was signed by 11 peers, 19 bishops and 75 MPs. Viscount Grey, Britain's foreign secretary, declared that no overseas issue had so intensely aroused the British public for 30 years. Conan Doyle wrote a pamphlet on the Congo atrocities which sold 25,000 copies in the first week alone. Yet today not one person in a thousand could say what the fuss was all about, unless, of course, they have read this amazing book.' Tariq Ali, Financial Times 'Fascinating ... brilliant and gripping' Mail on Sunday 'An exemplary piece of history writing: urgent, vivid and compelling' Literary Review

A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa

From acclaimed, best-selling author Adam Hochschild, a sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War told through a dozen unforgettable characters: a tale of idealism, suffering, and a tragically doomed yet noble cause.

A colorful, provocative study of King Leopold II of Belgium's genocidal plunder of the Congo in the 1880s, as the European powers were colonizing Africa, reveals the heroic efforts that led to the first international human rights movement.

Explores how Russians--prison survivors, historians, concentration camp guards, and others--are healing the wounds inflicted by long-repressed memories of the former leader and recounts the efforts of many to locate relatives who disappeared during Stalin's tenure.

Piotr Tarczyński

opowieść o chciwości, terrorze i bohaterstwie w kolonialnej Afryce

Duch króla Leopolda

For some 30 years, Adam Hochschild's voice has been one of the most distinctive in American journalism. With grace and wit, he has brought to a startling variety of subjects a combination of adventurous reporting and personal honesty. Hochschild's readers can count on an unobtrusive erudition, a sense of justice, and an irrepressible curiosity about life. Admirers of Hochschild's Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son will find in these articles the same warm autobiographical voice that made that book so memorable: He revisits his time as a civil rights worker in Mississippi, as a New England prep school student, and as a teenager seeing apartheid firsthand in South Africa. But readers will find much more as well: profiles of an adoptive Gypsy and of a governor general's son turned revolutionary, essays about Ernest Hemingway and John F. Kennedy, a journey to one of the most remote corners of the Amazon rain forest, and a remarkable evocation of two of Hochschild's personal heroes—who, in hillside trenches at the height of the Russian Civil War, faced each other across a battlefield.

Essays, Portraits, Travels

Finding the Trapdoor

The author, an activist in the anti-war movement and co-founder of "Mother Jones," America's largest progressive magazine, recounts his relationship with his father, chief of a multinational corporation that owned mines all over South Africa. Reprint.

A Memoir of Father and Son

Half the Way Home

In this rich collection, bestselling author Adam Hochschild has selected and updated over two dozen essays and pieces of reporting from his long career. Threaded through them all is his concern for social justice and the people who have fought for it. The articles here range from a California gun show to a Finnish prison, from a Congolese center for rape victims to the ruins of gulag camps in the Soviet Arctic, from a stroll through construction sites with an ecologically pioneering architect in India to a day on the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela. Hochschild also talks about the writers he loves, from Mark Twain to John McPhee, and explores such far-reaching topics as why so much history is badly written, what bookshelves tell us about their owners, and his front-row seat for the shocking revelation in the 1960s that the CIA had been secretly controlling dozens of supposedly independent organizations. With the skills of a journalist, the knowledge of a historian, and the heart of an activist, Hochschild shares the stories of people who took a stand against despotism, spoke out against unjust wars and government surveillance, and dared to dream of a better and more just world.

Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

die Geschichte eines der großen, fast vergessenen Menschheitsverbrechens

Schatten über dem Kongo

From the moment it began in 1936, the Spanish Civil War became the political question of the age. Hitler and Mussolini quickly sent aircraft, troops and supplies to the right-wing generals bent on overthrowing Spain's elected government. Millions of people around the world felt passionately that rapidly advancing fascism must be halted in Spain; if not there, where? More than 35,000 volunteers from dozens of other countries went to help defend the Spanish Republic. Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of King Leopold's Ghost, evokes this tumultuous period mainly through the lives of Americans involved in the war. A few are famous, such as Ernest Hemingway, but others are less familiar. They include a nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman, a fiery leftist who came to wartime Spain on her honeymoon; a young man who ran away from his Pennsylvania college and became the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid; and a swashbuckling Texas oilman who covertly violated US law and sold Generalissimo Francisco Franco most of the fuel for his army. Two New York Times reporters, fierce rivals, covered the war from opposite sides, with opposite sympathies. There are Britons in Hochschild's cast of characters as well: one, a London sculptor, fought with the American battalion; another, who had just gone down from Cambridge, joined Franco's army and found himself fighting against the Americans; and a third is someone whose experience of combat in Spain had a profound effect on his life, George Orwell. PRAISE FOR ADAM HOCHSCHILD "[An] excellent portrait of the war and of the men and women drawn to Spain ... It is Hochschild's vivid account of what these people witnessed that gives his book its edge. Many other writers have described the Americans who went to Spain, but few have brought to their accounts such an enjoyable and balanced mixture of history and personal narrative ... Hochschild is good at conveying the barbarity on both sides without letting it swamp the story ... fascinating." Literary Review "Hochschild tells nuanced tales of political awakenings and disillusionments, but also steadfast ethical commitment. He never descends into easy moralising . . . Spanish Civil War history is a minefield but Hochschild has entered it sure-footedly, with great respect for those whose lives where marked indelibly." BBC History Magazine

Van de Eerste Wereldoorlog zijn de begraafplaatsen en loopgraven in Noord-Frankrijk en België de trieste, stille getuigen. In Verzet en eendracht brengt Adam Hochschild de persoonlijke verhalen achter deze gruwelijke oorlog tot leven. Hij portretteert de oorlogshelden, maar vertelt ook de lang genegeerde drama’s van de tegenstanders, onder wie een toekomstige Nobelprijswinnaar en een redacteur die een krant op wc-papier uitgaf voor zijn medegevangenen die vanwege hun verzet achter de tralies zaten. Hochschild geeft een veelzijdig beeld van een oorlog die aan alle oorlogen een einde had moeten maken. Door de beschrijvingen van de levens van de historische personen leest Verzet en eendracht als een roman.

de grote oorlog 1914-1918

Verzet en eendracht

Op 22 mei 1787 besluiten twaalf bevlogen mannen in een Londense drukkerij een protest te organiseren voor de afschaffing van de slavernij. Directe aanleiding was het nieuws dat honderddrieëndertig zieke slaven over boord waren gezet zodat de eigenaar de verzekeringspremie kon innen. Het zou het begin zijn van de eerste mensenrechtencampagne in de westerse wereld. Aan de hand van de dagboeken van een journalist en de logboeken van een kapitein van een slavenschip laat Adam Hochschild zien hoe een aantal spraakmakende gebeurtenissen de publieke opinie deed omslaan en hoe de tegenstanders erin slaagden een protest te ontketenen dat wereldwijd uiteindelijk tot afschaffing van de slavernij zou leiden.

Adam Hochschild

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