History Books

Book SynopsisWritten in about 1340 by the Benedictine preacher Pierre Bersuire, The Moralized Ovid was a highly influential interpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the High Middle Ages. It contains descriptions of the gods followed by allegorical interpretations of major myths. This edition presents a new English translation and an authoritative Latin text.

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Book SynopsisHistories of remote islands around Japan are usually told through the prism of territorial disputes. In contrast, Takahiro Yamamoto contends that the transformation of the islands from ambiguous border zones emerged out of multilateral power relations. Demarcating Japan shows the crucial role of nonstate actors in formulating a territory.

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Book SynopsisThe astonishing, never-before-told story of the greatest rescue mission of World War II—when the OSS set out to recover more than 500 airmen trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia.“An amazing, riveting tale of unsung heroes who went above and beyond.”—James Bradley, New York Times bestselling author of Flags of Our FathersDuring a bombing campaign over Romanian oil fields, hundreds of American airmen were shot down in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Local Serbian farmers and peasants risked their own lives to give refuge to the soldiers while they waited for rescue, and in 1944, Operation Halyard was born. The risks were incredible. The starving Americans in Yugoslavia had to construct a landing strip large enough for C-47 cargo planes—without tools, without alerting the Germans, and without endangering the villagers. And the cargo planes had to make it through enemy airspace and back—without getting shot down themselves.   Classified for over half a century for political reasons, the full account of this unforgettable story of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and bravery is now being told for the first time ever. The Forgotten 500 is the gripping, behind-the-scenes look at the greatest escape of World War II.

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Book SynopsisStandard histories of infectious disease celebrate brilliant minds such as Florence Nightingale, John Snow, and Robert Koch. In this unorthodox telling, Jim Downs focuses on a forgotten group of contributors: the conscript soldiers, colonial subjects, and enslaved people whose bodies were the experimental matter on which medical progress relied.Trade ReviewFor those of us looking warily toward future epidemics, this book draws our attention to oft-forgotten sources of medical knowledge…Deserves to be read, particularly now. Few will question the salvational power that epidemiology will likely have in the years to come. -- Suman Seth * Science *Downs has now given global context to nineteenth-century advances in medicine and public health, beyond the dominant histories rooted in Western Europe and the ancient world. In Maladies of Empire, he centers slave ships, people living in colonized countries, prisoners, and wars in the narrative of medical discovery, at the foundation of epidemiology…He recovers lost and untold stories and makes visible things that need to be seen. -- Mary T. Bassett * Nature *[A] searching reappraisal of the origins of epidemiology…Those who lead epidemiology and public health today should read Maladies of Empire. They might wish to reflect on the origins of their discipline, the histories they choose to ignore, the myths they prefer to propagate. And they might wish to consider the debt they—we—owe to those who were, and in some cases still are, abused, mistreated, and manipulated in the name of public health. -- Richard Horton * The Lancet *Maladies of Empire has a captivating writing style, is exhaustively researched, and is persuasive in argumentation. Jim Downs has written a game-changing book. -- Deirdre Cooper Owens, author of Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American GynecologyMaladies of Empire provides an illuminating, painstaking, yet engaging interrogation of original records and sources, filling critical gaps in the development of epidemiology. Indispensable and compelling. -- Harriet A. Washington, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Medical ApartheidExposes how doctors with few clues made concerted efforts to track and understand deadly epidemics at a time when the colonialist enterprise was aggressively remaking the world…[Downs] fleshes out a crucial part of a larger tapestry to help explain the onset of racial segregation in the United States. The people whose experiences he tries to recover ‘appear only as fragments’ in the historical record but they impart a crucial dimension that remains utterly germane to the present. -- John Galbraith Simmons * Los Angeles Review of Books *Connects imperialism, enslavement, and warfare to argue that it is at the intersection of these processes that we can trace the beginnings of modern epidemiological thinking…Not only does such a narrative shed light on the violent foundations of disease control interventions and public health initiatives, but it also implores us to address their inequities in the present. At a time when low-income and middle-income countries struggle for access to vaccines in the COVID-19 pandemic, such an endeavor could not be more urgent. -- Raghav Kishore * The Lancet *Downs has written an eye-popping study of the history of infectious diseases, how they spread, and especially how they have been thwarted by experimentation on the bodies of soldiers, slaves, and colonial subjects. For three centuries medicine transformed science and human longevity by knowledge garnered from battlefields, slave ships, and mass migrations of vulnerable people. This is a timely, brilliant book about some of the brutal ironies in the story of medical progress. Our health today owes so much to the blood and suffering of nameless predecessors. -- David W. Blight, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of FreedomIn this brilliant and timely book, Jim Downs uncovers the origins of epidemiology in slavery, colonialism, and war. Controlling large populations through violence and burgeoning state bureaucracies allowed for new insights into the genesis and spread of human disease. A most original global history, this book is required reading for historians, medical researchers, and really anyone interested in the origins of modern medicine. -- Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize–winning Empire of Cotton: A Global HistoryMaladies of Empire is a major contribution to the ongoing investigation of the impact of slavery and colonialism on the modern world. Jim Downs shows how studies of exploited groups helped scientists understand the spread and treatment of infectious disease. At a time when epidemiologists are rightly lauded for their work in controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, Downs calls on us not to forget the role, without their consent, of the long forgotten enslaved, colonized, and imprisoned in the development and global dissemination of medical knowledge. -- Eric Foner, author of The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the ConstitutionMaladies of Empire shifts the site of medical knowledge from European cities to the international slave trade, colonial lands and wars, and the resulting movement of populations. This vivid and brilliant analysis of these critical sites fundamentally changes our views of the origins of epidemiology and the transnational flow of medical knowledge about disease transmission. This excellent work will surely become required reading for historians of medicine, disease, and empire. -- Evelynn M. Hammonds, coeditor of The Nature of DifferenceIn this meticulously researched and beautifully written work, Jim Downs transforms our understanding of the relationship between the history of medicine, colonialism, and the institution of slavery. Maladies of Empire illuminates the crucial connections between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comprehension of disease and the evidence gathered from captive Africans, enslaved plantation workers, and soldiers throughout the Atlantic world. Charting the origins of modern epidemiology in the inequities of forced labor, Downs makes foundational contributions to the histories of medicine, colonialism, and slavery. Everyone interested in the connections between race and disease should read Maladies of Empire. -- Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Reckoning with SlaveryA powerful account of the intertwined histories of medicine and empire, within a truly global framework. Simultaneously intimate and sweeping, Maladies of Empire reveals the human side of the development of epidemiology. Inverting the traditional focus on medical men, Downs puts soldiers, prisoners, and enslaved people at the heart of the rise of scientific medicine, providing a compelling account of how our modern-day tools of epidemiology were shaped by war, slavery, and colonialism. -- Erica Charters, author of Disease, War, and the Imperial StateA compelling read for everyone interested in the connection between slavery, colonialism, and war and the advancement of medical knowledge. -- Okori Uneke * International Social Science Review *Relevant reading for historians in a wide variety of fields but especially healthcare historians. By recognizing the experience of the enslaved poor and military in the evolution of medicine, it gives in part a voice to those who usually appear as a statistic while the clinicians are lauded. -- Michael Davidson * British Society for the History of Medicine *Using historiographical techniques developed by Black feminist scholars, Downs’ well-crafted narrative shifts the focus from the actions of individual physicians to the scaffolding that their research was built upon. It carries us from the crowded conditions on slave ships and prisons to filthy battlefields to plantations, reminding us that the data physicians used to develop theories of disease transmission, develop medical procedures, and recommend public health measures was built on a scaffolding of unacknowledged bodies belonging to soldiers, colonial subjects, and enslaved persons. -- Elisabeth Brander * The Watermark *Downs makes a strong argument that epidemiology (and much else in modern medicine) stemmed from close observation of non-European populations under conditions of European oppression: in slave ships, on colonial plantations, and in armies. -- Crawford Kilian * The Tyee *Maladies of Empire puts the public health of the U.S. early republic, antebellum, and Civil War eras into global context with that of the British Empire in a transoceanic discourse about bio-power, race, and medical authority. -- Zachary Dorner * Journal of the Early Republic *Downs’ analysis is innovative and his argument is convincing, buttressed by the wealth of physicians’ reports, correspondence, and medical journals…The book is a fantastic resource for students of medicine and history at any level, as the writing is clear and accessible, and for scholars interested in the global history of disease, especially in the era of COVID-19. -- Andrew Kishuni * Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History *Maladies of Empire is the best kind of transnational history—one that moves seamlessly across space and time, while drawing intricate connections about medical knowledge production in the critical field of epidemiology. Written in accessible prose, this timely book challenges readers to look closely at those hidden figures whose lives contributed to the development of modern medicine. -- Thomas J. Balcerski * Civil War History *If you are an aficionado of medical history, and of writers who try to set the record straight, this is a book for you. -- Patrick Skerrett * Stat *Downs has succeeded in adding an important new work to medical historiography by linking colonialism, slavery, and war, topics usually examined separately, and demonstrating persuasively that in the development of epidemiology, they are not separate at all, but inextricable. -- Jennifer Paxton * Southwestern Historical Quarterly *True world history, ranging from India and the Crimea to Jamaica. Turning the history of epidemiology on its head, inspired by Black feminist theory and criticism, Downs argues…‘how slavery is imprinted on the DNA of epidemiology.’ * New West Indian Guide *Slavery pervades Downs’s book. This theme is presented in an accessible and emotional tone, often transporting the reader to the underbelly of a slave ship or to the shadow of the hickory tree amidst a cotton plantation, to better situate the reader in the realities of forgotten human experiences that informed their contributions to epidemiology. -- Shibani Das * Imperial & Global Forum *An engaging narrative that provides valuable insights into the emergence of modern medicine and science…By elucidating the origins of epidemiology, Maladies of Empire allows public health officials to question whether their methods have any lingering traces of unequal power and control while affording scholars the opportunity to consider the ways in which health and medicine intersected with slavery, empire, and war in the past. -- John Rankin * Journal of World History *A must-read book for historians interested in the intersection of the history of medicine, slavery, and other forms of unfreedom. Downs’s talent for storytelling also makes this book compelling reading for students and lay readers alike. -- Christopher D. E. Willoughby * Black Perspectives *A page-turner…Downs’ peer-reviewed book is an asset to novices as well as public health experts. -- Nontsikelelo O. Mapukata * The Journal for Transdisciplinary Research in Southern Africa *Maladies of Empire leaves the reader with a greater appreciation for the people left out of traditional medical histories, some unforgettable stories, and many thought-provoking questions. -- Bradford J. Wood * North Carolina Historical Review *Maladies of Empire demonstrates the benefits of scholarship that crosses national and imperial historiographies, as well as the value of recovering aspects of lives only glimpsed in the archives. Downs’s engaging prose and clear argumentation make this book accessible to an undergraduate audience, as well as informative to senior scholars. -- Sean Morey Smith * Journal of the Civil War Era *Jim Downs has written an ambitious book…[It] is a significant achievement for the sheer number of cases of colonial medical experimentation and epidemiological studies that it brings to our attention and for shifting the focus of the social history of epidemiology to the colonies. It will become a vital text in historical and contemporary discussions on race, medicine, and decolonization. -- Pratik Chakrabarti * American Historical Review *Applying the study of history to medicine can often be uncomfortable, so I had some trepidation as I picked up Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs. The title certainly grabbed my attention; did these events really transform medicine? After reading this provocative book, it is hard to argue otherwise. -- Michael L. Farrell * Journal of Medical Regulation *

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Book SynopsisThe unique relationship between dogs and humans has had huge evolutionary consequences, changing the physical, behavioral, genetic, and emotional characteristics of both species. Pat Shipman looks to fossil records and new evidence to trace how the process of domestication worked and discovers how much of ourselves we owe to our canine companions.Trade ReviewThis book is a great read for anyone interested in dogs but is overall of a high enough quality for scholars to enjoy. Shipman explores the genetic, behavioral, and archaeological studies revealing the development of the companion relationship between people and dogs, and brings the human and canid settlement of the Australian region into a global context. -- Susan O’Connor, author of Transcending the Culture–Nature Divide in Cultural HeritageWhen, where, and how did the partnership between dogs and humans begin? Was it an accident? Was it inevitable? Where would we human beings be without our canine colleagues? Pat Shipman’s Our Oldest Companions is a must-read, a tour de force drawing together under one proverbial roof what science can tell us to date. A follow-up to her provocative and intriguing The Invaders, Dr. Shipman examines the anthropology and archeology of the dog’s transition from wolf to house pet all over the world, from the Australian Outback to north of the Arctic Circle. You’ll want to read this book three, four, even five times in order to absorb the abundance of research and ideas presented here. -- Wendy Williams, author of The Horse: The Epic History of Our Noble CompanionThe latest in a string of authoritative and readable books by Pat Shipman benefits from her well-known scientific knowledge and her great storytelling ability. One of the first times anyone has told how the evidence from archaeology and DNA of Sahul, with its late-appearing dingoes and singing dogs, adds to the human story rather than seeming anomalous. It is the perfect complement to other accounts written with a bias towards Africa, Asia, or Europe. This book, like the dogs that are at its center, covers all the continents where modern people have lived with them. Read it. You will enjoy it. -- Iain Davidson, author of Making Scenes: Global Perspectives on Scenes in Rock Art[A] lively tale of dog domestication and migration. -- Josie Glausiusz * Nature *The erudite Our Oldest Companions makes a remarkable story out of the long partnership between humans and dogs. * Foreword Reviews *A fascinating and often surprising exploration of human and canine evolution…[Shipman’s] captivating prose will enchant all readers seeking to learn more about humans, dogs, and our long history together. -- Adrienne Krone * Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture *

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Book SynopsisAcross the twentieth century, Asians imagined universalist ideals centered on the idea of Asia itself, rivaling European colonial thought, liberalism, and race-based nationalisms. Sugata Bose explores the history of Asian universalisms and reflects on their potential amid ongoing nationalist rivalries tied to religious majoritarianism and violence.Trade ReviewBose is at the top of his game—a brilliant, urgent, and passionate book. -- Tim Harper, University of CambridgeA trenchant, capacious, and moving feast of historical interpretation. Drawing on the full breadth of insights from a distinguished career studying Asia’s interconnected past, Sugata Bose illuminates ways to a more plural and inclusive Asian future. -- Sunil Amrith, Yale UniversityIn this enthralling intellectual history of a continent, Bose breaks out of European referents to focus on the mobility of Asian people, ideas, and imaginaries. A pathbreaking foray into the making of modern Asia. -- Seema Alavi, Ashoka UniversityThis is a deeply felt and carefully argued book. Sugata Bose captures the hopes and misjudgments of generations of Asian thinkers. He makes us wonder if the US-led international system based on sovereign nation-states and the new nationalisms that this system produced might have lured Asia too far for its alternative forms of universalism to succeed. Highly recommended. -- Wang Gungwu, National University of SingaporeA brilliant history of continental connections which offers vital lessons for Asia’s shared future. -- Amartya Sen, Harvard University

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Book SynopsisTurning Freud's famous dictum around, Thomas Laqueur posits that destiny is anatomy. Sex, in other words, is an artifice; and Making Sex tells the astonishing story of sex in the West from the ancients to the moderns.Trade Review[Making Sex is] a brilliant documentation of difference between the one-sex and two-sex models…presenting a simple theme with broad and cascading implications… I didn’t need Laqueur to teach me that sex was interesting, but now I have a broader base for this greatest of certainties. -- Stephen Jay Gould * New York Review of Books *[Laqueur] gives us an excellent sense of how our predecessors, including physicians and scientists, thought about the anatomy that fascinates every schoolchild… No one can doubt, after reading this book, that our notions of masculinity or femininity have been imposed on what are supposed to be objective biological observations. -- Melvin Konner * New York Times Book Review *[In this] challenging analysis of our ideas on gender…Laqueur shows how radically our consciousness of ourselves, our bodies, our sex has changed over the centuries. The categories we think of as most basic turn out to be mutable… And in this transformation, Laqueur emphasises, social changes were as crucial as medical teachings. -- Roy Porter * The Independent *Table of Contents1. Of Language and the Flesh 2. Destiny Is Anatomy 3. New Science, One Flesh 4. Representing Sex 5. Discovery of the Sexes 6. Sex Socialized Notes Credits Index

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Book SynopsisThrough case studies of scientists in the Amazon analyzing soil and in Pasteur’s lab studying the fermentation of lactic acid, Latour shows us the myriad steps by which events in the material world are transformed into items of scientific knowledge.Trade Review[Pandora’s Hope] brims with insight, and is frequently brilliant. It does what one always hopes for, but so rarely finds, in a philosophy book; it shakes assumptions so deeply held that you hardly knew they were there. It takes the world, reshuffles it, and deals it back; the cards are all the same, but the hand is crucially different… Pandora’s Hope, and its author, demand serious attention… Latour asks jarring and important questions and proposes jarring and brilliant answers. Kafka once wrote that a good book ought to have the fearsome impact of an ice ax. Pandora’s Hope does this. Having finished it, I am bloodied and befuddled. And I can think of no greater compliment for a book, or heartier endorsement. -- Noah J. Efron * Boston Book Review *In this book of impassioned and creative explorations into scientific life, Bruno Latour offers himself as a reasonable man who is ready and willing to lead combatants of the ‘science wars’ off the battle plain and onto higher ground… The text is comprised of essays about the genesis of and context for the science wars, case studies of scientific practice and elaboration of his current theoretical stances. His writing can be stimulating, fresh and at times genuinely moving… It is hard not to be caught up in the author’s obvious delight in deploying a classic work from antiquity to bring current concerns into sharper focus, following along as he manages to leave the reader with the impression that the protagonists Socrates and Callicles are not only in dialogue with each other but with Latour as well. -- Katherine Pandora * American Scientist *Show Latour an intellectual war zone and he’ll leap into the middle, to do battle with both sides… You can rely on [Pandora’s Hope] to shake your ideas up. And that’s almost never a bad thing, in science or elsewhere. -- Mike Holderness * New Scientist *Pandora’s Hope is Latour’s systematic defense of science studies, starting with impressions of his sojourn with five naturalists in Amazonia… His observations of [them] are overwhelmingly persuasive, and without a hint of supercilious hostility to the cause of science. Latour is proud to have been cited as co-contributor to their research report, and they must be equally pleased to figure in his. * Times Higher Education Supplement *His work sparkles with wit, sharp scholarship, graceful tropes, homely but apt metaphors, personal anecdotes at his own expense, and other jewels of the art of persuasion. It is always a pleasure to read or listen to Bruno, just for the vitality and fun of his mind. -- John Ziman * Interdisciplinary Science Reviews *Latour is concerned with making a case for the emerging field of ‘science studies,’ a discipline that proposes to study science and the scientific process itself on a philosophical and conceptual level. After an introductory chapter in which he lays the groundwork for science studies and its contributions to our knowledge of the nature of reality, Latour then provides a series of case studies showing scientists from various fields in action. In these case studies, which range from an analysis of a field trip by soil scientists in the Amazon to Louis Pasteur’s investigations of lactic acid fermentation in yeast, Latour carefully dissects the seen and unseen components of the scientists’ activity and thought. Latour’s engaging, clear writing style makes a difficult subject much easier to comprehend. -- R. K. Harris * Choice *Table of Contents"Do You Believe in Reality?" News from the Trenches of the Science Wars Circulating Reference: Sampling the Soil in the Amazon Forest Science's Blood Flow: An Example from Joliot's Scientific Intelligence From Fabrication to Reality: Pasteur and His Lactic Acid Ferment The Historicity of Things: Where Were Microbes before Pasteur? A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus's Labyrinth The Invention of the Science Wars: The Settlement of Socrates and Callicles A Politics Freed from Science: The Body Cosmopolitic The Slight Surprise of Action: Facts, Fetishes, Factishes Conclusion: What Contrivance Will Free Pandora's Hope? Glossary Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThe sense of reading as an intimate act of self-discovery—and of communion between authors and book lovers—has a long history. Lina Bolzoni returns to Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and Tasso, exploring how Renaissance humanists began to represent reading as a private encounter and a dialogue across barriers of time and space.Trade ReviewA Marvelous Solitude is a marvelous book: erudite, accessible, elegant. Bolzoni focuses on the intricate web of myths and metaphors that early modern thinkers spun around the activity of reading, yet there is much here that still whispers to our experience as readers today. -- Virginia Cox, author of The Prodigious MuseThis stimulating book offers a vivid survey of illustrious readers from Petrarch to Proust, woven in a dazzling verbal and visual tapestry that will delight the mind and eye of contemporaries still dwelling in the Gutenberg Galaxy. -- David Marsh, author of Giannozzo Manetti: The Life of a Florentine HumanistLina Bolzoni’s magisterial book is about reading, but it’s also about writers presenting themselves as readers who converse with the past, other texts, and other worlds through books—and then write their way out of these ‘theaters of reading.’ How many readers emerged as writers from the crucible of these reflections? How many more will by reading this book? -- Alexander Nagel, author of The Controversy of Renaissance ArtLina Bolzoni’s love affair with books is palpable in these pages dedicated to a remarkable cohort of writers and readers from Petrarch to Proust. Books in early modernity took on lives of their own, as readers saw in them opportunities for dialogue with the absent and the dead—and were often inspired to add to the conversation themselves. Bolzoni demonstrates that the marvelous—if occasionally risky—thing about the solitude of reading is that it’s never solitary, but full of friends. -- Jane Tylus, author of Reclaiming Catherine of Siena

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Book SynopsisThe twelfth-century Latin beast epic Ysengrimus is one of the great comic masterpieces of the Middle Ages. It recounts the persecution of the wolf Ysengrimus--who represents a hybrid abbot-bishop--by his archenemy Reynard the fox. The narrative's details are carefully crafted to make the wolf's punishment fit the abbot-bishop's crime.

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Book SynopsisMore than 50 years later the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Patrice Lumumba's assassination trouble people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick reveal a tangled web of international politics in which many peopleblack and white, well-meaning or ruthless, African, European, and Americanbear responsibility for this crime.Trade ReviewIn Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba, Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick open a wide aperture onto one of the most charged historical whodunits of the 20th century… It lays bare the entangled international actors that conspired to seal Lumumba’s fate and that of the independent Congolese nation… Death in the Congo is a riveting account. -- Caroline Elkins * Wall Street Journal *Death in the Congo is history for grown-ups, lucid and unsparing, alert to our infinite capacity for deceit and self-deception. -- John Wilson * Chicago Tribune *The story of Patrice Lumumba’s death is fascinating because it seems emblematic of the Cold War–era decolonization of Africa… What is distinctive and new in this very readable account is the authors’ unrelentingly negative portraits of all the actors involved. No one emerges unscathed: not the bumbling Congolese, not the Cold War-crazed Americans, not the petulant Europeans—and, worst of all, not even Lumumba himself, whom Gerard and Kuklick portray as a gifted speaker but also a self-promoter who was generally clueless about the exercise of power. -- Nicolas van de Walle * Foreign Affairs *While political violence is no stranger to the Congo, what happened to Lumumba in the early 1960s still matters… To this day no one has been prosecuted for Lumumba’s death. And this is where a book as calm, clear and authoritative as Emmanuel Gerard’s and Bruce Kuklick’s Death in the Congo adds true value. Novelists and filmmakers have all had a go at the Lumumba story, but here at last is history-writing at its most powerful: a work that reads in part like a charge sheet for a war-crimes prosecution and in part like a Shakespearian tragedy with farce thrown in… The drama of Lumumba’s death makes a grand finale. But the book’s true importance lies in spelling out the roles of the various powers involved, notably America and Belgium. Individual prosecutions are now unrealistic, but Death in the Congo demonstrates (something Tony Blair and George W. Bush might ponder) that it is never too late to investigate political decisions that lead to manipulation and murder. -- Tim Butcher * The Spectator *[Gerard and Kuklick] have bravely taken on the most important and disturbing assassination of a democratically elected leader in modern times, and an event on a par with that of Archduke Franz Ferdinand for the mayhem and madness left in its wake… Rather than interpreting [Lumumba’s] downfall as the result of crude Cold War anti-communism, Gerard and Kuklick rightly argue that Cold War tensions were more contextual, feeding into a U.S. commitment to support Western interests and influence in post-colonial Africa; its sympathy for Nato and its Belgian secretary general; and the Eisenhower administration’s hatred of Lumumba. -- Joanna Lewis * Times Higher Education *[Gerard and Kuklick] have brilliantly and usefully provided fresh details about how Lumumba, Okito, and Mpolo died. The book offers revealing photographs of Lumumba with others, including President Joseph Mobutu of Zaire… A book about an old story that has new nuances and details for its readers, who should definitely include general readers, students still in search of the truth about the assassination, and, indeed, seasoned as well as amateur Africanists. -- Dawn M. Whitehead * Africa Today *Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba is an eminently readable and absorbing book by Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick which examines the evidence in a balanced and coherent manner while examining the complex tapestry of the alliances, pacts, and promises that comprised relations over the Congo between Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), Brussels, the Katangan capital Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi), London, New York, and Washington… A thought-provoking work of history. -- Alanna O’Malley * H-Net Reviews *Death in the Congo captures a striking portrait of an international crisis in the early Cold War caused by one post-colonial nationalist’s rise to power. It meticulously details the way Patrice Lumumba was subsequently ousted and how his murder was encouraged by western powers. In many ways, it is a character study of the political leaders who instigated and backed Lumumba’s murder and the men in the lower ranks who carried it out. -- Neil Thompson * International Affairs *Outstanding… This major work of scholarship succeeds in showing how the convergence of a complex mix of interests and motivations resulted in Lumumba’s murder. -- Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja * Journal of American History *The authors provide wealth of detail in this worthy primer to the events that plunged the nation into decades of dictatorship under Joseph Mobuto (Mobutu Sese Seko). * Publishers Weekly *Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick shed light on an important episode in the annals of decolonization, the Cold War, and African nationalism, as well as on significant aspects of the domestic politics of Belgium and the United States. Death in the Congo is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the darker side of decision-making in ostensibly open and democratic political systems. -- Edouard Bustin, Boston University, Emeritus

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