Perspective

The author, Adam Hochschild, was born in New York in 1942. He briefly worked for an anti-government newspaper in South Africa during his college years and subsequently worked as a civil rights advocate during his mid 20s. During the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked as a journalist. He has published six books, a few of which deal with colonialism or tyranny. He has published articles in the New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and other national magazines. He has taught writing at the University of California, Berkeley. King Leopold's Ghost won the Duff Cooper Prize in Britain, the Gold Medal from the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The book has been criticized as being excessively politically correct.

The author became interested in the topic of colonization of the Congo while reading a book which...