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

Leopold II owned the Congo as his private property and killed or maimed ten million people in the extraction of rubber. Hochschild's book rescued this history from deliberate obscurity — the Belgian government suppressed it — and gave it back its scale and its faces. The atrocity photographs. The severed hands. The humanitarian investigators who were ignored. A masterpiece of historical reclamation.