King Leopold's Ghost

Adam Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in San Francisco with his wife. He is the author of Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 and King Leopold's Ghost: a Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa which won the Duff Cooper Prize in the UK, the Lionel Gelber Prize in Canada and was a finalist for the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award in the United States.

“An enthralling story, full of fascinating characters, intense drama, high adventure, deceitful manipulations, courageous truth-telling, and splendid moral fervor . . . 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.” —Neal Ascherson, Los Angeles Times   “A vivid, novelistic narrative that makes the reader acutely aware of the magnitude of the horror perpetrated by King Leopold and his minions.”  —The New York Times   “King Leopold’s Ghost is a remarkable achievement, hugely satisfying on many levels. It overwhelmed me in the way Heart of Darkness did when I first read it—and for precisely the same reasons: as a revelation of the horror that had been hidden in the Congo.” —Paul Theroux   “Carefully researched and vigorously told, King Leopold’s Ghost does what good history always does—expands the memory of the human race.” —The Houston Chronicle —