With a new foreword from best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver and a new afterword, King’s Leopold Ghost is riveting, eye-opening history from a master storyteller.

“As Hochschild's brilliant book demonstrates, the great Congo scandal prefigured our own times . . . This book must be read and reread.”—Neal Ascherson, Los Angeles Times
At the turn of the century, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium carried out a brutal plundering of the territory surrounding the Congo River. Ultimately slashing the area's population by ten million, he still manages to shrewdly cultivate his reputation as a great humanitarian. A tale far richer than any novelist could invent, King Leopold's Ghost is the horrifying account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who defied Leopold: African rebel leaders who fought against hopeless odds and a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure but unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust and participants in the twentieth century's first great human rights movement.