Lessons from a Dark Time, by Adam Hochschild, University to California Press, 2018

Lessons from a Dark Time, by Adam Hochschild, University to California Press, 2018

Hochschild is Professor of Journalism at University of California, Berkeley. This book, a thoughtful and appreciated Christmas gift from Rob, is a collection of 25 essays from Hochschild’s career in journalism, addressing wide-ranging issues from around the globe. Hochschild is an insightful writer, and displays investigative journalism at its best. Difficult to put down once you get into it. “I’m particularly attracted to writing about times and places when people felt a moral imperative to confront evil: whether in bearing witness to the prison camps of Stalin’s Soviet Union, battling apartheid in South Africa, exposing the forced labor system that King Leopold II of Belgium imposed on the Congo, working to end slavery in the British Empire, or resisting the madness of the First World War.” Reading this book prompted me to buy King Leopold’s Ghost, which I am currently reading.