Adam Hochschild – författare

Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize, Adam Hochschild's King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of Leopold's brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian.King Leopold's Ghost is the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.'All the tension and drama that one would expect in a good novel' - Robert Harris, author of FatherlandNow part of the Picador Collection

From the moment it began in 1936, the Spanish Civil War became the political question of the age. Hitler and Mussolini quickly sent aircraft, troops and supplies to the right-wing generals bent on overthrowing Spain's elected government. Millions of people around the world felt passionately that rapidly advancing fascism must be halted in Spain; if not there, where? More than 35,000 volunteers from dozens of other countries went to help defend the Spanish Republic.Adam Hochschild, the acclaimed author of King Leopold's Ghost, evokes this tumultuous period mainly through the lives of Americans involved in the war. A few are famous, such as Ernest Hemingway, but others are less familiar. They include a nineteen-year-old Kentucky woman, a fiery leftist who came to wartime Spain on her honeymoon; a young man who ran away from his Pennsylvania college and became the first American casualty in the battle for Madrid; and a swashbuckling Texas oilman who covertly violated US law and sold Generalissimo Francisco Franco most of the fuel for his army. Two New York Times reporters, fierce rivals, covered the war from opposite sides, with opposite sympathies. There are Britons in Hochschild's cast of characters as well: one, a London sculptor, fought with the American battalion; another, who had just gone down from Cambridge, joined Franco's army and found himself fighting against the Americans; and a third is someone whose experience of combat in Spain had a profound effect on his life, George Orwell.

National Bestseller • One of the year's most acclaimed works of nonfictionA BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, Kirkus, New York Post, Fast CompanyFrom legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a "masterly" (New York Times) reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threatened by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race, immigration, and the rights of labor.The nation was on the brink. Mobs burned Black churches to the ground. Courts threw thousands of people into prison for opinions they voiced—in one notable case, only in private. Self-appointed vigilantes executed tens of thousands of citizens’ arrests. Some seventy-five newspapers and magazines were banned from the mail and forced to close. When the government stepped in, it was often to fan the flames.  This was America during and after the Great War: a brief but appalling era blighted by lynchings, censorship, and the sadistic, sometimes fatal abuse of conscientious objectors in military prisons—a time whose toxic currents of racism, nativism, red-baiting, and contempt for the rule of law then flowed directly through the intervening decades to poison our own. It was a tumultuous period of American history defined by a diverse and colorful cast of characters, some of whom fueled the injustice while others fought for civil liberties: from the sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson, to the fiery antiwar advocates Kate Richards O’Hare and Emma Goldman, to labor champion Eugene Debs, to a little-known but ambitious bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover, and to an outspoken leftwing agitator—who was in fact Hoover’s star undercover agent. It is a time that we have mostly forgotten about, until now. In American Midnight, award-winning historian Adam Hochschild brings alive the horrifying yet inspiring four years following the U.S. entry into the First World War, spotlighting forgotten repression while celebrating an unforgettable set of Americans who strove to fix their fractured country—and showing how their struggles still guide us today.  This gripping work of political history reveals the forgotten forces that shaped modern America.A Forgotten Era of U.S. History: Uncover the shocking four-year period after World War I when American democracy faced one of its gravest threats.Widespread Political Repression: Witness an America of mob violence, government-led censorship, and the imprisonment of thousands for their political opinions.The Roots of Modern Division: Learn how the toxic currents of racism, nativism, and red-baiting from this era poisoned the nation’s politics for decades to come.Pivotal Historical Figures: Meet the cast of characters at the center of the storm, from a sphinxlike Woodrow Wilson to an ambitious young J. Edgar Hoover and the activists who fought them.

In this brilliant new work of history, Adam Hochschild follows a group of characters connected by blood ties, close friendships or personal enmities and shows how the war exposed the divisions between them. They include the brother and sister whose views on the war could not have been more diametrically opposed – he a career soldier, she a committed pacifist; the politician whose job was to send young men who refused conscription to prison, yet whose godson was one of those young men and the suffragette sisters, one of whom passionately supported the war and one of whom was equally passionately opposed to it. Through these divided families, Hochschild paints a vivid picture of Britain poised between the optimism of the Victorian era and the era of Auschwitz and the Gulag – a divided country, fractured by the seismic upheaval of the Great War and its aftermath.

In this rich collection, bestselling author Adam Hochschild has selected and updated over two dozen essays and pieces of reporting from his long career. Threaded through them all is his concern for social justice and the people who have fought for it. The articles here range from a California gun show to a Finnish prison, from a Congolese center for rape victims to the ruins of gulag camps in the Soviet Arctic, from a stroll through construction sites with an ecologically pioneering architect in India to a day on the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela. Hochschild also talks about the writers he loves, from Mark Twain to John McPhee, and explores such far-reaching topics as why so much history is badly written, what bookshelves tell us about their owners, and his front-row seat for the shocking revelation in the 1960s that the CIA had been secretly controlling dozens of supposedly independent organizations.  With the skills of a journalist, the knowledge of a historian, and the heart of an activist, Hochschild shares the stories of people who took a stand against despotism, spoke out against unjust wars and government surveillance, and dared to dream of a better and more just world.

In this rich collection, bestselling author Adam Hochschild has selected and updated over two dozen essays and pieces of reporting from his long career. Threaded through them all is his concern for social justice and the people who have fought for it. The articles here range from a California gun show to a Finnish prison, from a Congolese center for rape victims to the ruins of gulag camps in the Soviet Arctic, from a stroll through construction sites with an ecologically pioneering architect in India to a day on the campaign trail with Nelson Mandela. Hochschild also talks about the writers he loves, from Mark Twain to John McPhee, and explores such far-reaching topics as why so much history is badly written, what bookshelves tell us about their owners, and his front-row seat for the shocking revelation in the 1960s that the CIA had been secretly controlling dozens of supposedly independent organizations.  With the skills of a journalist, the knowledge of a historian, and the heart of an activist, Hochschild shares the stories of people who took a stand against despotism, spoke out against unjust wars and government surveillance, and dared to dream of a better and more just world.

Eighteenth-century Britain was the world’s leading centre for the slave trade. Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild, author of the Duff Cooper prize-winning King Leopold's Ghost, charts the history of the moment everything changed. In 1788, the slave trade flourishing across the British Empire, amassing wealth beyond measure. Bury the Chains is the remarkable story of the men who sought to end slavery and brought the issue to the heart of British political life.Hochschild, lauded for his scholarly prowess and engrossing storytelling, transports us from London's bustling coffee houses to the West Indies' backbreaking sugar plantations. Exploring the roles of key figures in the movement such as John Newton, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, and former slave Olaudah Equiano, it tells the history of the battle against an era of abhorrent human exploitation, illuminating the inception of the international human rights movement.Bury the Chains, a journey through some of the darkest times in history, compells us to honour the courageous heroes who dared to question, challenge, and ultimately bury the chains of social injustice.

Av författaren till Kung Leopolds vålnad En iskall gryning i norra Frankrike, januari 1917. Trettiosex skott smattrar genom tystnaden och arkebuseringen av de brittiska underofficerarna Joseph Stones, Peter Goggins och John McDonald är fullbordad. Deras brott var att ha flytt undan ett tyskt anfallskommando. Krigsmotståndarna fackföreningsmän, författare, journalister, arbetare förföljdes skoningslöst under första världskriget. 6 000 av de 20 000 män som vägrade värnplikt hamnade i fängelse. Adam Hochschild berättar den gripande historien om dem och om de många som på hemmaplan i Storbritannien förde en ojämn kamp mot den massiva värvningsyran och krigspropagandan. Första världskriget skördade mer än sex gånger fler dödsoffer än något tidigare krig. Hade nästa världskrig gått att undvika om freden i Versailles utformats bättre? Vad hade hänt om Storbritannien aldrig gett sig in i kriget 1914? Adam Hochschild har på svenska också givit ut Spräng bojorna. Han är en av grundarna till tidskriften Mother Jones och undervisar vid journalisthögskolan vid Berkeley, Kalifornien.