March 5: Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost
A slap-in-the-face account of one of the largest mass killings in history. As many as thirteen million dead. Jaw-droppingly shocking.
If we could replace every "rah-rah America" history book in school with something along these lines, I dare say it would solve half of the world's problems. Kudos to Hochschild for going where few had gone for almost a century, and for having the persistence to get the result published. It's a tragic commentary on developed-world society that Jersey Shore attracts millions, while the death of millions goes largely unnoticed.
Of course the book is not without its flaws. Hochschild's journalism has its own yellow bent, and this leaves us with a picture that is less telling and true than it could be. In Hochschild's world, it seems, characters are either very good or very evil. The exclusion of nuance from this book is a nearly-damning weakness--How are we to understand the genesis of great evil if we assume that the characters who perpetrate it are simply bad people? Even a small dose of positive economics, juxtaposed with the normative character-driven narrative, would have gone a long way.
Then again, I have my doubts that a less biased account would ever have seen ink. In a world of too much information, in which hooks, one-liners, and sales pitches are often all that escapes the miasma, who wants the whole truth? And that is the deep irony of this book: The reason that Leopold's Ghost is published and popular is the same reason that Leopold II was able to profitably bring so many Africans to their deaths and get away with it.
If we could replace every "rah-rah America" history book in school with something along these lines, I dare say it would solve half of the world's problems. Kudos to Hochschild for going where few had gone for almost a century, and for having the persistence to get the result published. It's a tragic commentary on developed-world society that Jersey Shore attracts millions, while the death of millions goes largely unnoticed.
Of course the book is not without its flaws. Hochschild's journalism has its own yellow bent, and this leaves us with a picture that is less telling and true than it could be. In Hochschild's world, it seems, characters are either very good or very evil. The exclusion of nuance from this book is a nearly-damning weakness--How are we to understand the genesis of great evil if we assume that the characters who perpetrate it are simply bad people? Even a small dose of positive economics, juxtaposed with the normative character-driven narrative, would have gone a long way.
Then again, I have my doubts that a less biased account would ever have seen ink. In a world of too much information, in which hooks, one-liners, and sales pitches are often all that escapes the miasma, who wants the whole truth? And that is the deep irony of this book: The reason that Leopold's Ghost is published and popular is the same reason that Leopold II was able to profitably bring so many Africans to their deaths and get away with it.
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