Adam Hochschild

Journalist Adam Hochschild is the author of "King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa" (Houghton Mifflin) about the brutal reign of King Leopold II of Belgium over the Congo in the 1880s. His regime sparked the creation of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." Leopold plundered the Congo's rubber, instituted forced labor, and reduced the population by half, committing mass murder. All the while, Leopold cultivated a reputation as a humanitarian.

Journalist Adam Hochschild's recent article in the New Yorker "Mr. Kurtz, I Presume" considers the colonial history of Zaire -- once known as the Congo -- looking for the prototype for Kurtz the fictional greedy ambitious white man of Joseph Conrad's novel "Heart of Darkness."

Adam Hochschild, founder of the leftist magazine "Mother Jones." He's written a memoir about his ambivalent relationship with his father, an industrialist who operated a string of gold and diamond mines in South Africa.