King Leopold II of Belgium exploited the Congo with a brutality that shocked even contemporaries inured to colonial violence, and Adam Hochschild's account of his reign of terror remains essential reading decades after publication. Between 1885 and 1908, Leopold held the Congo Free State as personal property, extracting rubber and ivory through a system of forced labor, hostage-taking, and mutilation. Villages that failed to meet quotas saw their inhabitants killed and their hands severed as proof of discipline. The death toll reached millions. Hochschild, a journalist and author, reconstructs this history through vivid characters: Leopold himself, a master of public relations who presented himself as a humanitarian; E.D. Morel, the shipping clerk who discovered the atrocities and launched a campaign against them; Roger Casement, the British consul whose reports documented systematic terror. The book shows how Leopold manipulated European governments and the press, how missionaries and merchants became complicit, and how a coalition of reformers eventually forced him to cede control. Hochschild connects this history to contemporary Congo, where the patterns Leopold established continue to shape politics and economics. The new edition includes a foreword by Barbara Kingsolver and an updated afterword. Readers seeking to understand the roots of modern central Africa, or the capacity of civilized nations for atrocity, will find Hochschild's narrative unforgettable.