HOCHSCHILD ADAM

(P/B) KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST
In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of th...
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(P/B) KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST
WINNER OF THE 1999 DUFF COOPER PRIZE In the late 1890s Edmund Morel, a young British shipping company official working in Antwerp, began to notice something that made him suspicious. When his company's ships docked from the Congo, the new colony that the Belgian king, Leopold II, had just carved out for himself, they were filled with immensely valuable cargoes of rubber and ivory. Yet when they sailed back to Africa, they carried nothing in exchange. Nothing, that is, except soldiers, military supplies and firearms. Horrified, Morel realiz...
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(P/B) SPAIN IN OUR HEARTS
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 ...
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(H/B) TO END ALL WARS
In this brilliant new work of history, Adam Hochschild follows a group of characters connected by blood ties, close friendships or personal enmities and shows how the war exposed the divisions between them. They include the brother and sister whose views on the war could not have been more diametrically opposed - he a career soldier, she a committed pacifist; the politician whose job was to send young men who refused conscription to prison, yet whose godson was one of those young men and the suffragette sisters, one of whom passionately su...
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