Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

Hochschild's (King Leopold's Ghost) latest work collects highlights from his prolific six-decade-long career. In several essays, one is amazed at the precise record of atrocities kept by those who committed them, with Hochschild's reporting helping to offer a realistic account. For instance, during the American occupation of the Philippines before World War I, army intelligence officers maintained meticulous (if often inaccurate) documentation of anticolonial sentiment, the same accounting was later used to weed out antiwar and prolabor voices during World War I and later echoed in the CIA's infiltration of student groups in the 1960s. Hochschild is adept at both journalistic and historical reporting, with the theme of humanity's capacity for darkness woven throughout. Abroad, Hochschild relates archival evidence on the number of lashes doled out to mine workers in the Congo by their Belgian overseers, thus demonstrating the need to put authority under a microscope and to step outside one's own experience to understand history.