From the Bookshelf of The Roundtable…

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

Adam Hochschild

Start date: July 1, 2015

Finish date: July 31, 2015

Discussion: Nonfiction Group Read

Discussion leader: Lauren

Find A Copy At

Libraries

Group Discussions About This Book

Showing 2 of 29 topics — 959 comments total

Nonfiction Group Read

August - Savage Harvest
By Lauren · 46 posts · 30 views

last updated Aug 29, 2019 04:52AM

Nonfiction Nominations for August 2019
By Lauren · 18 posts · 36 views

last updated Jul 15, 2019 08:41PM

showing 10 of 11 topics view all »

What Members Thought

Jun 07, 2015 Lark Benobi rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, nonfiction, africa, male-identified-authors, congo

Hochschild picks the perfect narrative voice for this harrowing story--his writes with an unassailable flatness, laying out one fact after another in a deliberate way and allowing the story to tell itself with a minimum of editorial interjection. He apologizes frequently along the way for having so little access to the voices of the Congolese victims, and then does all he can to allow them to speak through what evidence we do have. He spends careful pages of the book explaining how the truth was ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Jul 01, 2015 Pamela rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This is a brilliant and readable piece of non-fiction, telling the horrific story of forced labour, savagery, greed and corruption in the Congo under the Belgian king Leopold II. The first half of the book is devoted to relating how the situation in Africa evolved, leading to Leopold setting up the Congo as his personal possession, and then milking it of its resources (first Ivory, then rubber). We are introduced to major figures in the story - the explorer Stanley, the shipping company official ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Jul 21, 2012 Lauren rated it it was amazing

Shelves: own

In a world fully of shitty people, who do shitty things, who is the worst? I asked a friend, a friend who has studied such things, and she picked up a copy of the book, and showed it to me. This guy.

It took me about 10 years to get around to buying the book, and another 5 or so years to work up the courage to read it. You probably know how it is. You know you need to read that book on your shelf, but you know that it is one that will yet again decrease your faith in humanity, that will depress ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Dec 28, 2012 Lise Petrauskas rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, africa

A well-written, readable, informative book. The story is horrifying and unfortunately not uncommon in the annals of colonial history. What makes this story singular is that the whole colony was owned by one man and that man was a master of deception. His calculating greed and cynical manipulation of world opinion and media, his skillful flattery of anyone who could serve his ends, his deliberate obfuscation of the truth of makes him eligible for inclusion in a gallery of infamous dictators of th ...more

1 like · Like · see review

Dec 05, 2016 Elise rated it really liked it

Shelves: history, nonfiction, read-in-2016, 1990s, hubris

I went into this entirely uninformed about Congo’s colonial history. The story is horrific but despairingly not surprising, since it plays out how these situations always do whenever Europeans with more advanced weapons are hungry for resources, wealth, and power—Hochschild focuses on Belgium’s colony and the perhaps 10 million Congolese humans who died as a result of starvation, disease, and murder in exchange for ivory and rubber. It’s painful to read and painful to know that, despite the effo ...more

1 like · Like · see review