Book 9: King Leopold's Ghost

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

 

I actually bought this book for two reasons - I was reading Hochschild's book Bury the Chains and was very impressed by his prose and research, and I vaguely remembered a piece regarding Belgium and World War I from Pajiba Storytellers.  While I couldn't quite remember the name of the king during Word War I, I was curious to read about this dark period in Belgium's past after having read the rather glowing story of its actions during the Great War (for anyone that remembers that piece, Leopold II was Albert's predecessor and uncle).

 

As the book begins, Hochschild tells the story of how Africa had already been exploited by whites for many years due to the slave trade, but people still tended to have very few ideas about the rest of the continent, and developed crazy ideas about what lay within.  The mid to late 1800s marked a time of exploration, followed by exploitation.  Meanwhile, Leopold II comes to the throne of Belgium, and he is always rather disdainful of his crown and country.  The power of the monarchy has been much reduced from the past, and Leopold sees Belgium as small - from the first days of his reigns, he wants a colony so he can compete with the other European powers, and basically feel important.  After he realizes that most of the rest of the world has already been spoken for (sometimes by natives, most of the time by other European powers despite previously existing nations), he sets his sights on Africa, or more specifically the Congo region from which the Welsh/English/American explorer Henry Stanley (the truth and what Stanley told people didn't exactly match - he presented himself as American but was Welsh, and extremely pro-English) had recently made headlines.  His adventure stories about his journeys through Africa drew a large audience, though only very few would critique his harsh treatment of the Africans that he either used as porters and guides to explore this country, or the ones that were in villages that he came across and "fought" as he invaded their land in the name of exploration.

 

Somehow, Leopold managed to sell himself as a great humanitarian in the midst of all this, and convinced several countries to acknowledge and agree with his claim to the Congo, drawing up lines and divisions.  Leopold set up fake corporations and groups that led to him being in charge of the colony.  As a result, Belgium wasn't involved per se: the colony reported directly to Leopold, not to the King of Belgium or the country of Belgium (eventually Leopold would put a clause in his will making Belgium his heir to the colony, though this too was calculated, and there were a few changes to this before his death).  Leopold exploited the Congo and made the profit, though he would never set foot in his colony.

 

Hochschild describes the brutal ways Leopold's agents exploited the Africans of the Congon region, including enforced servitude as porters, the ivory trade, and finally the rubber trade.  To motivate villagers to search and harvest wild rubber vines, agents would take women and children hostage, and not feed or release them until the quotas had been met.  There were some rebellions but they proved unsuccessful.  While there were missionaries in the area, only a few spoke out.  Others would offer witness later after others had already gotten the ball rolling.  Some of the first men to speak out were two African-American men but they didn't receive much notice, especially the first one, due to their own skin color.

 

It would be E.D. Morel that would finally truly begin the crusade for human rights in the Congo.  He worked for a shipping company employed by Leopold, and he began noticing the disparity between what went to the Congo and what came out.  There was no way that the Congo would supply as much as it did for as little as it received without the use of forced labor, or slavery.  Using cold, hard facts, statistics and witness statements, he began a movement that would eventually gain world attention, and cause Leopold much grief.

 

One major flaw or complaint that Hochschild mentions regarding his own research is the fact that African voices weren't recorded.  For the most part, the only voices that have survived are those of white men talking about the area and its population.  Blacks simply weren't deemed important enough to tell their story.  In fact, not even Morel was actually advocating self-rule - he was simply calling for a gentler, more humane rule by whites, painting King Leopold as a villain.  Hochschild has no problem showing his heroes' flaws: Morel may have been committed to this cause, but he also turned a blind eye to other colonies, and believed that whites should rule in the colony.  Leopold, on the other hand, has no redeeming qualities.  In addition to being a dictator and megalomaniac, he is a complete asshole to his family, and in Belgium.  In his conclusion, Hochschild also discusses why the Congo raised as much awareness as it did: other colonies were just as brutal on occasion, but it was the Congo that led to a huge campaign; partially this was due to the size of the area, but it also had to do with who the colonizer was.  King Leopold and Belgium weren't the superpowers that England and Germany were so they were rather safe targets in comparison to these other empires.  Basically, this was an amazing book.  Hochschild did a great job of painting the picture and portraying the horrific events that were happening in the Congo as well as explaining the politics in Africa and Europe so that it becomes clear how Leopold could gain all this control.  Hochschild also addresses the current situation a bit.  While he even states that not all of Africa's problems could be blamed on colonization, it certainly hasn't helped matters.  It's definitely worth the read, and his references to Heart of Darkness may put that piece into a whole different perspective for readers.  In a nutshell, people like Kurtz really existed in the Belgian Congo.

Book 8: Annie's Ghosts

Annie's Ghosts: A Journey into a Family Secret by Steve Luxenberg

For some reason, I have been spending more and more time in the biography and history sections of bookstores lately. While walking through Barnes and Noble Saturday night, this book caught my eye, and I can't say why. It wasn't shelved in a way to draw attention, I'd never heard of the title or the author, but after checking it out on my Amazon app, I ended up buying it. Its topic and set up reminded me of two very different books I read last year - The Lost which chronicles one man's search to discover what had happened to part of his family that had been in East Europe during the Holocaust (the family all knew they had died, but not how), and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks which has a few scenes were the youngest daughter tries to track down information about an older sister that was placed in an asylum.

Steve and his siblings have always believed that their mother is an only child. When she is sick in the mid 90s, a caseworker asks about a younger sister that their mom mentions as part of her case history that had been institutionalized, but given the context, it sounded like this had happened when their mother Beth was around four. They never asked, and it wasn't until after their mother's death that the topic comes back up when one of the brothers gets a yearly notification about flowers for three graves (Beth's parents' and her sister's plots). However, this soon leads to the discovery that the sister died in 1972 at the age of 53, much later than they thought, and that she had been institutionalized at the age of 19, not 2. This gives Steve a whole different perspective on this mysterious sister - this wasn't a little girl that his mother vaguely knew about, this would have been someone that his mother grew up with and then kept hidden for most of her adult life.

The book chronicles Luxenberg's journey to explore what had happened, why his mother had kept this secret, and to find out who his aunt Annie was. Since many of the people that would have any knowledge are dead by this point, the author must rely on court records and medical documents to build a picture of Annie, though many of these records are out of his reach, or destroyed due to their age. He also discovers family members he never knew existed, and it puts many of his mother's comments and stories in a new perspective.

Luxenberg never does find all the answers: the records show when Annie lived but he has hard time figuring out much about what her life was like beyond generics from talking to psychiatric specilialists, and workers at the institute where she spent most of her life. Additionally, he can make guesses and assumptions of what drove his mother but will never have clear answers. Given some of the people he interacts with, he realizes that the shame she felt for her sister portrays her negatively but he doesn't shy away from telling this story to the world, or trying to reconcile his idea of a caring mother with the woman that left her sister behind. His research also leads him into the history of mental disorders in this country, and most of the experts assure him that based on what the case files say of Annie, her case would have been treated very differently today than it was then due to available medication, treatment and attitudes about free will and institutionalization. That isn't to say that everything is better now than it was - the comment is made repeatedly that "some portion of the homeless today are the mentally ill of yesterday" (315).

Overall, I quite liked the journey and the way Luxenberg portrayed exactly what routes he had available to him to discover information. One of his newly discovered cousins lost her family in the Holocaust, and as result, her take on Beth's actions are understandably harsh. After all, this woman had lost her family only to confront a cousin that hides her family. I compared it to The Lost earlier since both chroncile the author's search into family histories with very little to go on due to a lack of paper trail, and a lack of surviving witnesses. I would say, though, that this is more tightly written and focused than the other narrative. I admit, though, that some of the parts about Luxenberg's father's service in the military struck me in the wrong way though it shows more honesty on the author's part. He doesn't try to turn his father into a war hero, and while he tries to find a motive for his mother's actions, he doesn't try to justify them. I'm not sure what kind of audience this book was written for (genealogist? People interested in the history of mental illness in the US?), but I definitely enjoyed it.

Book 7: Thirteen Reasons Why

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher

 

"My life happens to, on occasion, suck beyond the telling of it.  Sometimes more than I can handle.  And it's not just mine.  Every single person down there is ignoring your pain because they're too busy with their own.  The beautiful ones.  The popular ones.  The guys that pick on you.  Everyone."  Buffy, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 3 "Earshot"

 

I picked this up after seeing several positive reviews on the Cannonball Read site (both III and IV).  While I can see where it might raise some good discussions about suicide for the teens, and understand why it would therefore be as praised as it is, overall, the book just didn't quite do it for me.  There was something about it that was just too shallow, and I actually quite disliked Hannah, the girl that killed herself.  I basically just wanted to point her to the above quote from Buffy and tell her that other people have pain too - in fact at least one of the people on her list of reasons why had reasons to be in more pain than Hannah yet Hannah blames that girl for her suicide.

 

Clay Jenson is the novel's narrator, and he receives a mysterious package one day when he gets home from school.  The package contains seven cassettes, and he soon discovers they contain recordings from Hannah Baker, a classmate who recently killed herself, detailing her reasons why.  As she explains there are thirteen reasons, and each person receiving these tapes is one of these thirteen.  The tapes will circulate in order, otherwise, a second copy of the cassettes will be passed to the public and reveal everyone's secrets.  Clay who worked with Hannah, and had a crush on her, naturally wonders what he may have done to be one those tapes, and the only thing he can really come up with is that he didn't reach out or speak to her enough.  He has to listen to the tapes to find out the reason, though.

 

Honestly, as Hannah even admits, the first few people targeted didn't even necessarily do anything that bad - however, their small actions led to rumors about her and left her with a certain reputation: the boy that kissed her, and exaggerated exactly what had happened to his friends; the boy that put her own a "who's hot, who's not" list, thus making the boys at school sexualize her, all things that added up to more.  While she describes some incidents about how this reputation hurt her (a guy that sexually harrassed her, another who assumed he might get some action on a date with her), I don't feel like the author quite convinced me that her life was that bad.  I understand that suicide isn't logical, and that teenagers will think things are worse than they are, but I felt like it would have worked better for me if Hannah had elaborated more on her reputation and how that affected how people treated her rather than just alluding to her reputation and how everything snowballed.  She at one pont mentions that there were over three dozen names of people that had wronged her, but only these thirteen were linked.  Maybe if she had alluded to incidents with these other twenty people, it would have felt like more of an explanation for her suicide rather than a revenge plot.

 

The book also didn't go where I expected it would given how Hannah spends the first half of the novel showing how boys treat her based on her perceived reputation.  While Hannah says that her life got so bad she couldn't think of any other solution, in the long run, it seems like her suicide was more about revenge against perceived and actual wrongs.  Hannah herself is not always likable, and the action that appears to be her breaking point wasn't actually anything that happened to her.  In fact, it was a case where she did exactly what she's accusing everyone else of doing to her: not being supportive, not thinking about how her small actions could affect others, being too self-involved to notice another individual's pain.

 

As much as I disliked Hannah and her choices, I understand that suicide is a big deal.  We have quarterly training on it where I work to ensure that people can recognize the warning signs.  We're given cards to carry around with the acronym ACE to remind us what to do when we run into someone that we suspect is suicidal (Ask, Care, Escort).  Basically, I'm glad if this opens up discussions for high schoolers, and I understand that the reasons why often might not make sense to outsiders; still, I wish I could have cared more for Hannah, and that Asher had made a flawed character towards whom I could have felt more empathy and sympathy than I did.

Book 6: Instruments of Darkness

Instruments of Darkness by Imogen Robertson

 

Set in 1780, the novel begins when Gabriel Crowther, a local scientist and recluse, receives a visit from Harriet Westerman after she has discovered a body on her morning walk.  Due to an article Crowther had written about forensics that Harriet happened to read, she feels he might be useful in helping discover the reason behind the death before the local law sweeps it under the carpet.  The novel goes back and forth between the country setting of West Sussex and a family in London, whose connection to West Sussex quickly becomes obvious.

 

Suspicions of the murder fall on the inhabitants of Thornleigh Hall, a place that seems to have a dark past.  Hugh, the current heir (only because the oldest son has disappeared), at one point was interested in Harriet's younger sister, but after an initial courtship he took to drink and moodiness.  In addition to flashing between locations, the novel also goes back five years in the past when Hugh served in the colonies fighting in the beginnings of the rebellion.

 

The murderer was fairly obvious early on in the novel, but I liked the large cast of characters that Robertson used.  None of them were exactly very original or even that well developed, but there was something about the novel that was rather endearing to me.  The author also did a good job of moving the plot forward (I still think of A Beautiful Blue Death when I read mysteries set in earlier time periods - the author was so concerned with developing the detective's quirks that the murder mystery took second place to tea and scones - definitely not something I'd recommend).  I'd recommend this to someone who is a mystery junkie and really enjoys historical fiction, but might be too simple a mystery or too superficial for a reader that is only one of the two.

Book 5: Catherine the Great

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman by Robert K. Massie

 

Considering that I majored in both history and gender studies, I must say that I felt that my knowledge of Catherine the Great was rather lacking: I knew she was originally German, that she adored the French before the French Revolution, that she rebelled against her husband and became the ruler of Russia, and that she had love affairs.  I also vaguely remember seeing a movie or miniseries about her on TV in Germany when I was much younger though I only recall one or two scenes, and couldn't even tell you at this point if it was a German production, or simply dubbed from another country (while trying to research this I discovered two films about Catherine the Great made in the 90s that would possibly fit the time line, one with Catherine Zeta Jones, and one with Julia Ormond).  While I learned quite a bit more about Catherine, I'm not quite sure how I feel overall about the book.

 

It's a well-written book, and very informative - there's absolutely no question about that.  It is also very engaging, and not a dry history.  For the most part, I think Massie also realizes that his readers may not be as familiar with Russian history as other topics in Western history and gives sufficient context.  Sometimes I wish the current popular history books would actually use end notes more to cite their facts rather than just listing sources at the end of the book.  Personally, I would have appreciated a family tree somewhere at the beginning or end of the book, or possibly a lineage of succession since the throne seemed to go through quite a few people between Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.  I also could have used a footnote in the beginning to give some context to the sums of money that were mentioned - when Massie states that Catherine received 100,000 rubles as a gift, it sounds like a large number, but I really had no clue what that would compare to today, or even how that compared to an average man's income in Russia.  Those are minor quibbles.  Still, while I thoroughly enjoyed the beginning of the book about Catherine's struggles to rise to power, at the end I felt some ambivalence.  However, I'm not sure if my ambivalence was directed at the book or at Catherine - it's a bit hard to tell since this is a biography.  There were some things that Catherine did that I just didn't like that much, so I think in the end my issues are more with Catherine the person than this book about Catherine.

 

The first half of the book is a rather straight forward, linear narrative during which Massie chronicles the early life of Catherine, and gives context to some of the people that would play such important parts in her life, including her mother, the Russian empress Elizabeth, and her husband Peter.  Since Catherine wrote a memoir about this part of her life, Massie has some relatively intimate details to draw on, though of course they portray Catherine in a positive light.  Still, while I definitely felt sympathy for Catherine and her unhappy married life (her husband simply wasn't interested in her, even at the best of times, she was more of a companion than a marriage partner, making it rather impossible for her to produce an heir to the throne), Massie still managed to show a certain sympathy to the other people in her life, even as their actions affected Catherine in negative ways.  Elizabeth for example was erratic in her favor, but still had redeeming qualities though they come to light less as she gets older.  Catherine is always ambitious, and slowly learns to make the proper alliances, turning former enemies into allies, and using her spare time to improve herself intellectually.  While Massie certainly shows that Peter wasn't all bad, and in some cases was shaped by his early childhood, he definitely portrays him as a manchild that is in no way ready to lead a country, especially Russia given his hate of all things Russian and love of all things Prussian.

 

As a result, it is not a surprise that Catherine eventually took on a lover after nine years of marriage, and she and Massie both strongly imply that her son Paul is the offspring from that illicit relationship.  Her husband was wildly unpopular with the military, and with the help of another lover, Catherine gained the support of the military, allowing her to lead a coup d'etat against Peter, and become the ruler of Russia in her own right.  She didn't rule as a regent to her son - a German woman became the empress of Russia.  The fact that she was able to do this is rather impressive, but Russia had women rulers before her, so it's not as big a surprise in some ways as it may have been in other countries.

 

After this, the book focuses on themes in Catherine's rule.  Massie still tries to keep thing in chronological order, but given all the wars that were going on, he ends up talking about one at a time.  While this helps the reader keeps the wars and their battles straight, there is a disadvantage to this technique: many of these things were happening simultaneousley, so since Massie compartmentalizes these topics, it means the reader doesn't quite realize just how much was going on at any one point in the empire - the war with Turkey, rebellions in the east, the French revolution which severely frightened Catherine, especially given the rebellion she faced herself.  In the beginning of her reign, Catherine was idealistic, and began friendships with some of the most prominent philosophers of the period, to include Voltaire.  She even wanted to end serfdom.  By the end, she had become much harder, and feared the possibility of the serfs speaking out or fighting against their lot.  While this makes sense based on the Pugachev rebellion, it was a bit sad to see her become more jaded as time went.  Based on what Wikipedia says, there were more rebellions than this one, but Massie only briefly mentions one other incident with the serfs at the mines, and one ill-fated attempt to free a former chid tsar from imprisonment.

 

Her interactions with Poland especially struck me the wrong way - she first forced one of her former lovers to become the king, and then over the years, she along with the rulers of Prussia and Austria parcelled the country up between them.  Poniatowski never wanted to be king, and his last meeting with Catherine after over twenty years of separation was particularly sad to me.  He clearly stayed in love with her much longer than she remained interested in him, and her only reason for wanting him on the throne was that he woud be easy to manipulate.  While I think Massie focuses on showing how Catherine was rather just and lenient in the ways she governed, there were definitely a few occasions where I felt rather sorry for the way she reacted to people, Poniatowski being one of the big ones that comes to mind.

 

Catherine also made use of favorites like Russian emperors before her (well, empresses - when the rulers were male, the term mistresses was used).  Some of these helped her along politically.  Her first lover may or may not have been the one to get her pregnant with an heir, her third lover Orlov helped her gain the throne, and her fifth lover, Potemkin, was instrumental to Russia's success in the Crimean area.  Potemkin was possibly as ambitious as Catherine and their relationship was definitely odd, to say the least.  Massie portrays Catherine as someone that enjoyed having male companionship, and a series of men provided this to her as time went on.  She parted amicably with all of them, even the ones that cheated on her.

 

Catherine spent about half her life as the empress of Russia.  The book is basically evenly divided, spending about half its time on her thirty-three years before reaching the throne, and half on the thirty-four years as empress.  As I said, I quite liked the first half and felt it went into great detail.  However, I feel like maybe a larger percentage of the book could or should have been devoted to her time as empress since she had more responsibilities.  While Catherine certainly accomplished many things and became seen as an enlightened ruler of her time, I still would have liked to see a bit more analysis on why she acted the way she did in some cases.  She was an enthusiastic supporter of the arts, and bought many pieces that would become cornerstones of Russia's art collection, she communicated with philosophers and rulers of the time, reformed certain parts of Russia, and yet for some reason, I still felt like there was something missing in this description.  I can't quite put my fingers on it - maybe I heard too much about Catherine's favorites, but especially the last part of the book, I didn't really feel like she was real.  It seemed more like Catherine had made an image of herself that she presented to the public, and the book didn't get beyond that public persona.  It is only so noticeable because the first half of the book seems to offer a more intimate glance at the woman.  Despite that, I still enjoyed the book and am glad I read, finally filling in a gap in my knowledge of this woman.  I admit I probably wouldn't have even thought to pick up a book about Catherine the Great if this new biography hadn't been published recently, so I definitely think it was a good thing that Massie wrote this book instead of the market being saturated with yet another book about the Tudors.  Maybe this will lead me to a few more biographies on the subject that focus on different aspects of Catherine's rule.

Book 4: The Lost Wife

The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman

 

When I was younger, I read a lot of novels and books about World War II.  These topics still tend to show up quite a bit in my reading lists, though I no longer necessarily pursue them actively.  However, if someone recommends a Holocaust book or I stumble across one at the book store, I will usually pick it up.  While browsing through Barnes and Noble last weekend (I had a four day weekend, and somehow, whenever I feel like I should leave the house but have no clue what to do, I always end up at the bookstore with a chai latte or white chocolate mocha), I noticed this novel on the shelf due to the vintage looking picture in a European setting (it's Prague, but I wasn't looking closely enough to consciously register that at first glance).  After reading the back cover, I was sold.  Now, as many Holocaust novels as I've read, I am not sure if I'm a good judge of them.  Since it is a topic I have read so much over the past, one would think that would make me a harsh critic.  Instead, I seem to have a blind/soft spot for these novels, and I will rarely find faults with them.  For example, in any other novel, I would probably be skeptical of the love story or slightly cynical, but in this case, I basically accept that these characters meet and fall in love quickly (I also started this right after A Discovery of Witches, so I may have felt it was unfair that I bought Josef and Lenka's love story but not Diana and Matthew's, but really these characters are more developed in half the time).

 

The novel begins with a wedding in the present day.  The groom's grandfather and the bride's grandmother meet for the first time at the rehearsal dinner, and the grandfather feels that he knows the grandmother from somewhere.  The chapter ends with the man, Josef, declaring that he is her husband.  From there, the novel flashes back in time to Prague in the 1930s, and alternate chapters between Lenka and Josef.  The set up is interesting: while Richman alternates between the two characters, the stories are actually very different.  Josef tells a story of life after loss, and his marriage to Amalia, another Jewish woman, whom he met after the end of the war.  While discussing his life after the war, he occasionally goes back further as he reminisces about certain scenes in his life.  However, for the most part, Josef tells about his life with Amalia and his children, their quiet and muted love that is rather passionless but safe.  Both suffer from survivor's guilt, and Josef remains haunted by the thoughts of his first love, Lenka.  Normally, it would bug me if someone was still obsessing about their first love after fifty years, but this wasn't a normal break up - Josef believes that he lost her to the war and the Holocaust.  It's a relationship that ended unnaturally and suddenly and as result, it haunts him.  Lenka's story on the other hand is one of survival, covering her time in Prague, as the rules get stricter and stricter until she and her family are moved to Terezin (Theresienstadt), the "model" concentration camp, or the one that Nazi officials used to show the Red Cross that they weren't mistreating the Jews.

 

Since Richman uses Terezin as a setting, she introduces many actual historical figures.  Lenka was an art student, and ends up working in the art department, surrounded by men and women whose secret work, buried throughout the camp, survived the Holocaust to give witness to their experiences.  Some of the people Lenka meets and knows include Bedrich Fritta, Leo Haas and Otto Unger.  In fact, Richman's description of Otto's death reminded me of a scene from the TV miniseries Holocaust (back before Netflix, my dad would borrow very random things from the library) which may well have been inspired by the actual artist's life.  The miniseries Holocaust and the film The Last Butterfly both explored life in Terezin since it was such an oddity, though I can't think of many novels at this moment that devote much time to Terezin.  I'm sure there are some, but most tend to focus on the bigger camps (Auschwitz was also addressed in this novel since that's where many of Terezin's prisoners were eventually deported to).  The prisoners of Terezin lived in squalor, misery, and fear, and yet they also had some chances and freedoms that weren't available in other camps.  Richman explains in an interview that her original intent with this novel was to write about the Holocaust from an artist's perspective, and the love story idea came later after she overheard a conversation about a situation similar to the one that starts off the novel.

 

I thought the novel worked well; obviously, the reader knows that Lenka will survive, but I really enjoyed how Richman explored these characters' lives.  I would warn that part of the back cover was misleading (at least to me).  At one point, it states that "an unexpected encounter in New York leads to an inescapable glance of recognition, and the realization that providence has given Lenka and Josef one more chance."  This novel doesn't explore this second chance.  The wedding is used purely as a framing device, and while part of me was curious how things would play out between Josef and Lenka after all these years, the novel ended exactly where it needed to end.  Basically, I definitely recommend this novel, although one further caveat: my copy of the novel calls it "The Sophie's Choice of this generation" - I feel like that statement does the novel a disservice, not because this isn't a good novel, but because I don't think the storylines of these two novels compare or are really that parallel to each other.  I could be wrong on that, though - Sophie's Choice didn't actually leave much of an impression on me.

Book 3: Bury the Chains

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild

I actually picked this book up because I was interested in Hochschild's book To End All Wars, but I wanted to check out his writing style before buying a hardcover book by an author I'd never read. While I still haven't picked up To End All Wars, another one of his books, King Leopold's Ghost, has made it to my to read pile since I started reading this. Being an American, I of course had the same American history class in 8th grade, 11th grade, and then the AP version in 12th grade. I also majored in history (among other things) in college, so I'm definitely aware of the big picture history of how slavery ended in the United States and some of the debates and conflicts leading up to the Civil War, and finally the end of slavery. However, I knew much less about what was going on across the ocean in Britain - I vaguely knew that slavery there had ended around 20 years before the Civil War started, and that the British didn't fight a war in the process of abolishing it. It vaguely made sense to me because it's not like England had much use for slavery. As it turns out, that is a very simplified version of looking at it, and this book tells the history of how the British Empire came to abolish first the slave trade and finally slavery itself.

Hochschild introduces the year 1787 as a watershed year for the British abolitionist movement. In Britain, abolitionists didn't refer to people trying to end slavery; it referred to people trying to abolish the slave trade which included the journey over the middle passage that has become so infamous. In the first part of the book, he describes the slave trade, and its importance to the British economy. He states that when the twelve men got together to formally begin the abolitionist movement, banning the slave trade would be comparable to starting a group that intended to get rid of cars - it was simply that big a part of the economy of the Empire and a part of live. He also introduces the men that would have such influential roles in swaying public opinion. For example, there was Granville Sharp, who was involved in a myriad of causes, and from an influential family. He played a role in a court case that would end slavery in England itself. As Hochschild explained, the ruling didn't quite state that, but that's what everyone thought it stated, and in a case of "perception is reality," the court case effectively ended slavery in England - if someone brought a slave there, they weren't slaves any longer. Another important man would be Olaudah Equiano, a former slave, who would be one of the first men to put his story to the page, thus gaining the sympathy of many. Thomas Clarkson was one of the driving forces in the movement and devoted his life to spreading the word. Additionally, the group quickly gained on member of parliament as part of its team, William Wilberforce.

While it wasn't easy going, and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade faced many defeats and obstacles, Hochschild demonstrates just how innovative they were. Many of the things that groups still do today to raise awareness can be traced back to this society, who either invented or perfected the methods, such as newsletters, strategic boycotts (the boycotts against sugar were much more effective than the American boycott of tea), and collections of facts. Clarkson spent a large part of his time finding witnesses that told of the conditions on slave ships, on plantations, and the effect this industry had on white men, who were sometimes kidnapped or forced into contracts as sailors on these ships (speaking of the ill effects this had on white Englishmen helped the cause because it made it hit closer to home). The abolitionists realized that it was easier to raise people's sympathies by giving them the facts than citing religious texts. Though the slave trade wouldn't be abolished until 1807, public interest caused parliament to have hearings on the subject only five years after the society formed.

While slavery wasn't important in England itself, it played a huge role in the British Empire due to the actual slave trade, and the sugar plantations in places like Jamaica. The society originally focused on the abolition of the slave trade because they believed that without a constant resupply of slaves, slavery would eventually die out. While this would not be the case, the slave rebellions in Haiti (or St. Domingue) and the extreme loss of money and life that resulted from British involvement in trying to suppress these rebellions eventually led to more people being opposed to slavery. As it turns out, just because there wasn't a civil war doesn't mean that the British didn't participate in wars that had to with slavery.

I really liked this book - the end of slavery in the British Empire was something I knew very little about and had a rather simplistic view of prior to reading this. Hochschild states that he purposely doesn't get into the politics of the American abolitionist movement, but the book is still far-ranging, covering several decades and places on either side of the Atlantic. It certainly wasn't a simple journey, and Hochschild talks about the way this story was originally written in history. Since slavery was abolished due to both members of parliament, and a group of civilians, there were two routes through which this could have been seen: the benevolent empire giving freedom to all and being a shining beacon to the rest of the world, or a group of revolutionaries that engaged the public and forced the government's hand. For over a century, the first view won out, almost leaving people like Clarkson out of history (Clarkson was the only one of the twelve original members that survived to see slavery abolished in 1838). Fortunately, this book is a rather fitting tribute to the movement, showing how all the events came together that led to the abolition of slavery. Of course freedom didn't solve everything: owners were given financial restitution when the government freed their slaves, and the freed men and women were left to fend for themselves with no resources. Hochschild certainly doesn't try to glamorize the men, and later women, that were part of the different anti-slavery societies. Much like in the States, many of these people were confused as to how they felt about freed blacks and what they felt their roles should be. Some of them were paternalistic while others were oddly conservative when it came to just about every other topic, but overall they achieved something that would have seemed almost impossible when they started. I also liked that Hochschild didn't just show the white perspective. He included Equiano, and the slave rebellions in the West Indies, preventing this from being simply a story about white people being benevolent saviors.