Title: Should be required reading
Product review: This book should be required reading for world history education. Adam Hochschild has performed a service to humanity by presenting the gruesome facts about the extermination of a people through greed, corruption and ritual murder in such a way as to present a fair report championing the rights of the oppressed, while explaining the motivations of the oppressors within the beliefs of the times. This book was impossible not to finish, mainly because to deny the enormity of the slaughter and the secrets exposed felt like a personal rejection of the innocents. Months later I'm still thinking about it. What is so soulshattering is that the Congo again, starting in 1959, has experienced yet another unbelievable decimation of its population through (admittedly well-intentioned) polio vaccination and misguided food sources resulting in the crossover of SIV to AIDS. Who is writing their story today?
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