Leopold, a King of a small country and a man with very limited powers, decides that he desperately needs to find a colony where he can reign supreme. He finally discovers Central Africa, a place that hasn't been gobbled up by the other colonizing powers, and claims it for his own. What ensues is one of the most brutal subjegations in recorded history. King Leopold's reign in the Congo was so vicious that even the other colonial powers of the day had to condemn him.This book is the story of a man that was so greedy- even the pretext of humanitarian aims were summarily ignored during his rule.

One of the things I liked most about this book is that it deflates the hero status of people like Henry Morton Stanley- an insecure man who shot Africans for sport. In his place, Hochschild has given us people like E.D.Morel, William Sheppard, Roger Casement and Hezekiah Shanu to look up to. People who tried to make a difference when it wasn't popular to do so.

This book is the very sad story of how the ego of one puny despot lead to the deaths of millions.

Informative, honest and well written- I highly recommend this book.


well done   June 25, 2000
 22 out of 23 found this review helpful

One of my favorite aspects of good historical nonfiction is that it conveys a sense of detail, depth, and texture that is sometimes absent from the most perceptive fiction.

Hochshild's book concerns not only King Leopold, as the title seems to imply, but an immense collection of both famous and lesser participants and variables in the Congo issue. One will be enthralled by the political dexterity of King Leopold, and his procedure for securing and gaining worldwide respect for his mission.

King Leopold's Ghost is all the more readable because it is not polemically charged. Hochschild does not seek a "politically-correct" blanket indictment of Western Civilization that is popular these days. Hochschild, the historian, carefully and explicitly reminds us of the complexity of historical men and motives, of the savagery and benevolence of Africans and Europeans alike.


An absorbing and horrifying book!   May 20, 2000
 21 out of 25 found this review helpful

One of the best indictments of colonialism that I have ever read, King leopold's Ghost is obsensively a book about power and greed.

Leopold, a King of a small country with very limited powers, decides that he desperately needs to find a colony where he can reign supreme. He finally discovers Central Africa, a place that hasn't been gobbled up by the other colonizing powers, and claims it for his own. What ensues is one of the most brutal subjegations in recorded history. King Leopold's reign in the Congo was so vicious that even the other colonial powers of the day had to condemn him. This book is the story of a man that was so greedy- even the pretext of humanitarian aims were summarily ignored during his rule.

One of the things I liked most about this book is that it deflates the hero status of people like Henry Morton Stanley- an insecure man who shot Africans for sport. In his place, Hochschild has given us people like E.D. Morel, William Sheppard, Roger Casement and Hezekiah Shanu to look up to. People who tried to make a difference when it wasn't popular to do so.

This book is a very sad story of how the ego of one puny despot lead to the deaths of millions.

Informative, honest and well written- I highly recommend this book.


Is it "true"?   March 14, 2003
 21 out of 41 found this review helpful

After reading Stanley's "Into the Dark Continent," and liking it a great deal, I was instructed by other readers to read "King Leopold's Ghost" if I wanted to know "the truth." I have read it, and the primary effect of having done so is to make me wonder about the transitory and ambiguous nature of the concept of "truth."

Hochschild's book tells the tale of King Leopold II of Belgium and his decisive land grab of the Congo in the late 19th century, and also of Leopold's use of Henry Morton Stanley as a public relation's tool and a kind of "My man in Africa."

In short, I have found the work terribly biased and slanted to the author's views. It is not a bad book, or badly researched in general. It is certainly worth reading as part of the literature of the time and place, but the author has come to the work with a point of view, which is obvious. Particularly his picture of the African explore, H.M. Stanley. His portrait of Stanley is lifted almost entirely from Bierman's "Dark Safari: The Life behind the Legend of Henry Morton Stanley" which has been for years a shamefully hateful and incomplete picture of Stanley, but the source that is currently considered the "true" portrait of the great explorer (Stanley's own autobiography is still the only source for his early life, but the author roundly dismisses it, of course, for its presumed embellishments).

Hochschild's picture of Stanley is the currently popular one: a massively insecure man given to self-promotion; a driven individual with a compulsive need to prove himself, stemming largely from his orphaned and neglected childhood. Thus the book is riddled with amateur psychology and wild leaps of faith and assumption regarding Stanley's motives and thoughts. For example:

"With every step he took in Africa, Stanley planned how to tell the story once he got home."

". . . he was always sculpting the details of his own celebrity."

"Livingston was haloed in Stanley's prose, for he was the noble father figure the younger man had long been looking for . . ."

None of these things the author has any way of knowing, and are all armchair assumptions. They reveal the author's own views, and the book is full of such opinions put down as fact.

One of the book's praised heroes is George Washington Williams, a black American and sometime journalist who wrote of the miserable conditions of blacks in Africa. Looking at the details of this man's life, a reader with a cynical eye might concluded this man was simply a bunko artist looking for the most profitable hustle. Throughout his many and various "careers" he lied about going to Harvard, he lied about having a doctoral degree, and he abandoned his wife and fifteen year old son to escape mounting debt that resulted from his various failed schemes - only to become engaged during a shipboard romance just before his death. One might expect a writer of Hochschild's obviously distaste for self-promoters would cast a cynical gaze to anything Williams might write about Africa. Surely, as he so keenly observed with Stanley, the author might assume that Williams had traveled to Africa to make a public relations splash for himself after his sensational writings of Africa. But, no, this is not the case. For Hochschild, Williams's writings of Africa "were a cry of outrage that came from the heart." Once again, the slippery nature of truth is a matter of interpretation.

So, what is true? At the time of publication, Stanley's "Into the Dark Continent," was considered true. Most Europeans believed that Africa was full of poor, unenlightened blacks living in squalor, subject to the whims of brutal rulers and slave traders; beings who desperately needed our help and the Christian faith. Today, Hochschild boosts the popular belief that Africa at the turn of the century was full of a contented people living in a workable, peaceful society, which was destroyed by the avarice and greed of white Europeans. What will be the truth in a hundred years?

So, finally, what is true? Well, that depends. What do you want to believe?