In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million--all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated. King Leopold's Ghost is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II. With great power and compassion, King Leopold's Ghost will brand the tragedy of the Congo--too long forgotten--onto the conscience of the West.

亚当•霍赫希尔德（Adam Hochschild）出生于1942年，美国作家、记者和演讲家。他于1963年毕业于哈佛大学历史和文学系。迄今他出版了很多脍炙人口的作品，包括《回家路上：一对父子的回忆录》（Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Fat her and Son）、《特立独行的鬼魂：俄国人记忆中的斯大林》（The Unique Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin）。他的《利奥波德国王的鬼魂》一书入围美国国家图书评论奖终选名单。

【译者简介】

扈喜林，自由译者，内蒙古人，毕业于对外经济贸易大学，主要从事品牌管理、创新研究、心理学、小说等领域的翻译工作，翻译出版了《绿色黄金》等近30部作品。