RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a superb synoptic history of European misdemeanor in central Africa ... Hochschild\'s sketches of these three individuals are vivid, and his depiction of what they and many others were confronting is masterly. It shows, above all, that during Leopold\'s rule in Africa from 1885 to 1908, and in the years on either side of it, the peoples of the Congo River Basin suffered, in Hochschild\'s words, \'a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.\' This is not said lightly ... Hochschild is right to think of this story as a template of modernity, not only in terms of Leopold\'s public-relations skills but also in terms of the great distance between the violence unfolding in the Congo and its instigators in Europe. Hochschild puts this bluntly, without oversimplifying ... He also argues, convincingly, that the story of the Congo was \'the first major international atrocity scandal in the age of the telegraph and the camera.\'
