Starred review from August 1, 2018
An eminent public historian offers perspective on the Trump era.Hochschild (Journalism/Univ. of California; Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 2016, etc.) has spent his career writing about imperialism, racism, war, tyranny, and the relationships among them. This collection of two dozen previously published essays was explicitly constructed as a response to the presidency of Donald Trump. As he writes in the introduction, "we have some tough years ahead of us....But when times are dark, we need moral ancestors, and I hope the pieces here will be reminders that others have fought and won battles against injustice in the past, including some against racism, anti-immigrant hysteria, and more. The Trumps and Putins of those eras have gotten the ignominy they deserve." Some of those moral ancestors are famous. He describes a 1994 campaign trip with Nelson Mandela, conveying Mandela's moral authority but also noting another reason apartheid ended: "South Africa's largest corporations had had enough. The endless conflicts and the growing international boycotts and embargoes were bad for business." Of Mark Twain, one of several authors Hochschild spotlights, he writes, "Twain understood, more clearly than most white Americans, that the Civil War had changed too little, and that for former slaves, the United States could still be a place of lynchings and terror." Some of the inspiring individuals he writes about are not as well-known--e.g., Rebecca Masika Katsuva, who runs a program to aid some of the thousands of girls and women raped during civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (she herself was a victim of multiple rapes). In these essays about places around the globe, Hochschild's graceful, informative, straightforward writing always finds the telling detail as well as the people of courage in the most horrifying of situations.Focusing on some of the direst eras of recent history, these potent essays nevertheless find reason for hope in the idealism of individuals.
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August 27, 2018
In this inconsistent collection of previously published work, historian Hochschild (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939) gathers essays concerning various forces of injustice and inhumanity around the world and throughout the ages, in hopes that readers might take solace in the examples of those who fought injustice and sought to transform the world for the better. Most of the book is organized geographically, with sections devoted to Africa, Europe, India, and the U.S., and many of the essays about specific places are stories of Hochschild’s travels, as a Fulbright lecturer, journalist, or political organizer. The works are mostly anecdotal and at times disjointed, with Hochschild relaying his observations of telling details to frame his political insights. For instance, in a visit to South Africa’s Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, the “ultimate authority in interpreting the post-apartheid constitution,” he notes that “the room in which the Court meets is unlike any courtroom I’ve seen anywhere in the world: a bowl-shaped auditorium, which means that the judges of this high court sit below the audience rather than above it.” The technique lends the essays a conversational tone, which can be distracting but is perhaps effective for introducing lessons about a dark time.
Starred review from October 1, 2018
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. VERDICT A necessary look at a past that feels uncomfortably familiar. One is left to wonder how future essayists in Hochschild's circle will view the world we currently inhabit.--Bart Everts, Rutgers Univ.-Camden Lib., NJ
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