Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists is mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes.

Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies — all motionless except for one moving image — a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur.

In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, a gorilla with an extraordinary vocabulary of 620 “signs,” the most ever learned by a primate, and she likes to fingerpaint. But recently, her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642 . . . a drawing of an ancient lost city. A new expedition — along with Amy — is sent into the Congo where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death …
source: michaelcrichton.com

Congo

In the 1880s, as the European powers were carving up Africa, King Leopold II of Belgium seized for himself the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. Carrying out a genocidal plundering of the Congo, he looted its rubber, brutalized its people, and ultimately slashed its population by ten million—all the while shrewdly cultivating his reputation as a great humanitarian. Heroic efforts to expose these crimes eventually led to the first great human rights movement of the twentieth century, in which everyone from Mark Twain to the Archbishop of Canterbury participated.

"King Leopold's Ghost" is the haunting account of a megalomaniac of monstrous proportions, a man as cunning, charming, and cruel as any of the great Shakespearean villains. It is also the deeply moving portrait of those who fought Leopold: a brave handful of missionaries, travelers, and young idealists who went to Africa for work or adventure and unexpectedly found themselves witnesses to a holocaust. 

Adam Hochschild brings this largely untold story alive with the wit and skill of a Barbara Tuchman. Like her, he knows that history often provides a far richer cast of characters than any novelist could invent. Chief among them is Edmund Morel, a young British shipping agent who went on to lead the international crusade against Leopold. Another hero of this tale, the Irish patriot Roger Casement, ended his life on a London gallows. Two courageous black Americans, George Washington Williams and William Sheppard, risked much to bring evidence of the Congo atrocities to the outside world. Sailing into the middle of the story was a young Congo River steamboat officer named Joseph Conrad. And looming above them all, the duplicitous billionaire King Leopold II.

With great power and compassion, "King Leopold's Ghost" will brand the tragedy of the Congo—too long forgotten—onto the conscience of the West.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Picador Classic)

The gripping saga of one of the world's most devastated countries

The Democratic Republic of Congo currently ranks among the world's most failed nation-states, second only to war-torn Somalia. David Van Reybrouck's "Congo: The Epic History" of a People traces the history of this devastated nation from the beginnings of the slave trade through the arrival of Sir Henry Morton Stanley, the ivory and rubber booms, colonization, the struggle for independence, and the three decades of Mobutu's brutal rule. Van Reybrouck also examines the civil war—the world's deadliest conflict since the Second World War. Still raging today after seventeen years, the Congolese war is driven, in part, by the demand for the rare-earth minerals required to make cell phones.

Van Reybrouck has balanced hundreds of interviews with meticulous historical research to construct a many-dimensional portrait of the rich and convoluted history of Congo. Taking pains to seek out the Congolese perspective on the country's history, Van Reybrouck creates a panoramic canvas wherein the child soldiers whom he encounters in the eastern rebel territories talk candidly about their choices and misfortunes, and where elderly Congolese—some of them more than one hundred years old—reminisce about their lives in a country where the average life expectancy has dropped to forty-five.

Vast in scope yet eminently readable, both penetrating and deeply moving, "Congo" does for Africa what Robert Hughes's masterful and novelistic "The Fatal Shore" did for Australia. Van Reybrouck takes a deeply humane approach to political history, focusing squarely on the Congolese perspective and returning a nation's history to its people. Published to rave reviews in Belgium and the Netherlands in 2010, Congo has now been gracefully translated by the exceptional Sam Garrett, most recently the translator of Herman Koch's bestselling "The Dinner".

Congo: The Epic History of a People

At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal and unstaunchable war in which millions have died. And yet, despite its epic proportions, it has received little sustained media attention. In this deeply reported book, Jason Stearns vividly tells the story of this misunderstood conflict through the experiences of those who engineered and perpetrated it. He depicts village pastors who survived massacres, the child soldier assassin of President Kabila, a female Hutu activist who relives the hunting and methodical extermination of fellow refugees, and key architects of the war that became as great a disaster as--and was a direct consequence of--the genocide in neighboring Rwanda. Through their stories, he tries to understand why such mass violence made sense, and why stability has been so elusive.

Through their voices, and an astonishing wealth of knowledge and research, Stearns chronicles the political, social, and moral decay of the Congolese State.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

He was known as "the Leopard," and for the thirty-two years of his reign Mobutu Sese Seko, president of Zaire, showed all the cunning of his namesake, seducing Western powers, buying up the opposition, and dominating his people with a devastating combination of brutality and charm. While the population was pauperized, he plundered the country's copper and diamond resources, downing pink champagne in his jungle palace like some modern-day reincarnation of Joseph Conrad's crazed station manager.

Michela Wrong, a correspondent who witnessed firsthand Mobutu's last days, traces the rise and fall of the idealistic young journalist who became the stereotype of an African despot. Engrossing, highly readable, and as funny as it is tragic, her book assesses how Belgium's King Leopold, the CIA, and the World Bank all helped to bring about the disaster that is now the Democratic Republic of Congo. If, in this poignant account, the villains are the "Big Vegetables" ("les Grosses légumes") — the fat cats who benefited from Mobutu's largesse — the heroes are the ordinary citizens trapped in a parody of a state. Living in the shadow of a disintegrating nuclear reactor, where banknotes are not worth the paper they are printed on, they have turned survival into an art form. For all its valuable insights into Africa's colonial heritage and the damage done by Western intervention, "In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz" is ultimately a celebration of the irrepressible human spirit.

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo

Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in “one of the darkest places on earth.” Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.

A reflection on corruptive European colonialism and a journey into the nightmare psyche of one of the corrupted, "Heart of Darkness" is considered one of the most influential works ever written.

Heart of Darkness

"The Poisonwood Bible" is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family's tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

The Poisonwood Bible

From the author of the "New York Times" bestselling and award-winning "Not on Our Watch", John Prendergast co-writes a compelling book with Fidel Bafilemba--with stunning photographs by Ryan Gosling--revealing the way in which the people and resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been used throughout the last five centuries to build, develop, advance, and safeguard the United States and Europe. The book highlights the devastating price Congo has paid for that support. However, the way the world deals with Congo is finally changing, and the book tells the remarkable stories of those in Congo and the United States leading that transformation.

 The people of Congo are fighting back against a tidal wave of international exploitation and governmental oppression to make things better for their nation, their neighborhoods, and their families. They are risking their lives to resist and alter the deadly status quo. And now, finally, there are human rights movements led by young people in the United States and Europe building solidarity with Congolese change-makers in support of dignity, justice, and equality for the Congolese people. As a result, the way the world deal with Congo is finally changing.

 Fidel Bafilemba, Ryan Gosling, and John Prendergast traveled to Congo to document some of the stories not only of the Congolese upstanders who are building a better future for their country but also of young Congolese people overcoming enormous odds just to go to school and help take care of their families.

 Through Gosling's photographs of Congolese daily life, Bafilemba's profiles of heroic Congolese activists, and Prendergast's narratives of the extraordinary history and evolving social movements that directly link Congo with the United States and Europe, Congo Stories provides windows into the history, the people, the challenges, the possibilities, and the movements that could change the course of Congo's destiny.

 Chosen by Amazon as the Best Book of the Month for December 2018 in Biographies &amp; Memoirs, History, and Nonfiction.

 Featuring the life story of Dr. Denis Mukwege, winner of the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize

Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed

The Rwandan genocide sparked a horrific bloodbath that swept across sub-Saharan Africa, ultimately leading to the deaths of some four million people. In this extraordinary history of the recent wars in Central Africa, Gerard Prunier offers a gripping account of how one grisly episode laid the groundwork for a sweeping and disastrous upheaval. 
 Prunier vividly describes the grisly aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, when some two million refugees--a third of Rwanda's population--fled to exile in Zaire in 1996. The new Rwandan regime then crossed into Zaire and attacked the refugees, slaughtering upwards of 400,000 people. The Rwandan forces then turned on Zaire's despotic President Mobutu and, with the help of a number of allied African countries, overthrew him. But as Prunier shows, the collapse of the Mobutu regime and the ascension of the corrupt and erratic Laurent-D�sir� Kabila created a power vacuum that drew Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and other African nations into an extended and chaotic war. The heart of the book documents how the whole core of the African continent became engulfed in an intractible and bloody conflict after 1998, a devastating war that only wound down following the assassination of Kabila in 2001. Prunier not only captures all this in his riveting narrative, but he also indicts the international community for its utter lack of interest in what was then the largest conflict in the world.

Praise for the hardcover: 

"The most ambitious of several remarkable new books that reexamine the extraordinary tragedy of Congo and Central Africa since the Rwandan genocide of 1994."
--"New York Review of Books"

"One of the first books to lay bare the complex dynamic between Rwanda and Congo that has been driving this disaster."
--Jeffrey Gettleman, "New York Times Book Review"

"Lucid, meticulously researched and incisive, Prunier's will likely become the standard account of this under-reported tragedy."
--"Publishers Weekly"


Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

«Esta es la historia de un fracaso»: así empieza el diario del Che sobre la expedición al Congo en 1965, la primera misión internacionalista de Cuba, en espera de que llegaran a estar maduros los tiempos para la anhelada redención en América.
Al frente de un batallón de revolucionarios cubanos, el Che llega al Congo, después del asesinato del presidente Lumumba, para ayudar a Kabila –actual jefe de estado congolés– y a otros dirigentes del movimiento de liberación africana que combaten a Mobutu, el dictador impuesto por las potencias coloniales.
Pero la situación del país africano es tal que puede hacer entrar en crisis cualquier plan estratégico: el naciente ejército es indisciplinado y con insuficientes convicciones ideológicas, las cabezas políticas y militares no tienen una consecuente relación con la población, y la división tribal es fortísima e impide la unificación nacional.

Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo

The people of the Congo, as this book shows, have suffered cruelly throughout the past century from a particularly brutal experience of colonial rule; and, following independence in 1960, external interference by the United States and other powers, a whole generation of patrimonial spoliation at the hands of Mobutu (the dictator installed by the West in 1965), and periodic warfare which even now continues fitfully in the East of the country. But, as this insightful political history of the Congolese democratic movement in the 20th century decisively makes clear, its people have not taken these multiple oppressions lying down. Instead, the Congolese people have struggled over the years to improve their conditions of life by trying both to establish democratic institutions at home and to free themselves from exploitation from abroad; indeed these cannot be separated one from the other. 

 The author of this book, Professor Nzongola-Ntalaja, is one of the country's leading intellectuals. Despite being forced into long years of exile (during which he taught political science in the United States and elsewhere), he has played a part at significant moments in his country's political struggle. His deep knowledge of personalities and events, and his understanding of the underlying class, ethnic and other factors at work, make his book a compelling, lucid, radical and utterly unromanticized account of his countrymen's struggle. In acknowledging their defeat, he sees it and the crisis of the post-colonial state as the result of the breakdown of the anti-colonial alliance between the masses and the national leadership after independence. 

 This book is essential reading for understanding what is happening in the Congo and the Great Lakes region. It will also stand as a milestone in how to write the modern political history of Africa. 

The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History

Shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, "The Catastrophist" is a haunting novel set in the politically charged landscape of the Belgian Congo just before independence. At its heart is the passion between novelist James Gillespie and the fiery idealistic journalist Inès, whom he follows to Africa as their affair begins to fray. They are as unlike as lovers can be: He is willfully apolitical and desperate for her love, while she is obsessed with the unfolding drama, caught up in history, hero worship, and soon, a new passion. In a country that will self-destruct upon giving birth to itself, Gillespie is plunged into violence and betrayal, and moved by love to a final act of nobility. "The Catastrophist" delivers heart-stopping suspense, profound moral questioning, and a searing depiction of a doomed love.

The Catastrophist: A Novel

Over the past two decades, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been at the centre of the deadliest series of conflicts since the Second World War, and now hosts the largest United Nations peacekeeping mission in the world. In this compelling book, acclaimed journalist Michael Deibert paints a picture of a nation in flux, inching towards peace but at the same time solidifying into another era of authoritarian rule under its enigmatic president, Joseph Kabila.

 Featuring a wealth of first-hand interviews and secondary sources, the narrative travels from war-torn villages in the country's east to the chaotic, pulsing capital of Kinshasa in order to bring us the voices of the Congolese - from impoverished gold prospectors and market women to government officials - as it explores the complicated political, ethnic and economic geography of this tattered land. A must-read for anyone interested in contemporary Africa, The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between, Hope and Despair sheds new light on this sprawling and often misunderstood country that has become iconic both for its great potential and dashed hopes.

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

When Querry, a world-famous architect, finds he no longer enjoys life or takes pleasure in art he sets off on a voyage. Arriving anonymously at a leper colony in the Congo, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper mutilated by disease and amputation. Querry slowly moves towards a cure, his mind getting clearer as he works for the colony. However, in the heat of the tropics, no relationship with a married woman, however blameless, will ever be taken as innocent.

A Burnt-Out Case

Lit with humor, full of African birdsong and told with great narrative force, No Mercy is the magnum opus of "probably the finest writer of travel books in the English language," as Bill Bryson wrote in Outside, "and certainly the most daring."

Redmond O'Hanlon has journeyed among headhunters in deepest Borneo with the poet James Fenton, and amid the most reticent, imperilled and violent tribe in the Amazon Basin with a night-club manager. This, however, is his boldest journey yet. Accompanied by Lary Shaffer--an American friend and animal behaviorist, a man of imperfect health and brave decency--he enters the unmapped swamp-forests of the People's Republic of the Congo, in search of a dinosaur rumored to have survived in a remote prehistoric lake.

The flora and fauna of the Congo are unrivalled, and with matchless passion O'Hanlon describes scores of rare and fascinating animals: eagles and parrots, gorillas and chimpanzees, swamp antelope and forest elephants. But as he was repeatedly warned, the night belongs to Africa, and threats both natural (cobras, crocodiles, lethal insects) and supernatural (from all-powerful sorcerers to Samal�, a beast whose three-clawed hands rip you across the back) make this a saga of much fear and trembling. Omnipresent too are ecological depredations, political and tribal brutality, terrible illness and unnecessary suffering among the forest pygmies, and an appalling waste of human life throughout this little-explored region.

An elegant, disturbing and deeply compassionate evocation of a vanishing world, extraordinary in its depth, scope and range of characters, No Mercy is destined to become a landmark work of travel, adventure and natural history. A quest for the meaning of magic and the purpose of religion, and a celebration of the comforts and mysteries of science, it is also--and above all--a powerful guide to the humanity that prevails even in the very heart of darkness.

No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo

A thrilling account of the extraordinary efforts of Allied intelligence in gaining control of Belgian Congo's uranium mines and keeping them from Hitler and Stalin. 

This book is the true story of American spies in Africa in the Second World War, which until now has never been researched or told. It is set against the background of one of the most tightly guarded secrets of the war -- America's struggle to secure enough high quality uranium to build atomic bombs. These efforts were focused on the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo, which was described within the Manhattan Project as the 'most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world'. Uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. Given the very real possibility that Germany was also working on an atomic bomb, it was an urgent priority for the US to prevent uranium from the Congo being diverted to the enemy. This task was given to the newly-created Office of Strategic Services in Washington, which sent some of their best Secret Intelligence agents under cover to the Belgian Congo to track the ore and to hunt for Nazi collaborators. Their assignment was made even tougher by the complex colonial reality and by tensions with British officials. 

"Spies in the Congo" tells the story of the men -- and one woman -- who were sent on this dangerous wartime mission

Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore That Built the Atomic Bomb

Patrice Lumumba, first Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo and a pioneer of African unity, was murdered on 17 January 1961. This publication unravels the appalling mass of lies, hypocrisy and betrayals that have surrounded accounts of the assassination of Lumumba.

The Assassination of Lumumba

Faced with an identity crisis in his work and his life, seasoned traveler and journalist Jeffrey Tayler made a bold decision. He would leave behind his mundane existence in Moscow to re-create the legendary British explorer Henry Stanley’s trip down the Congo in a dugout canoe, stocked with food, medicine, and even a gun-toting guide. But once his tiny boat pushed off the banks of this mysterious river, Tayler realized he was in a place where maps and supplies would have no bearing on his survival. As Tayler navigates this immense waterway, he encounters a land of smothering heat and intense rains, wary villagers, corrupt officials and dead-eyed soldiers demanding bribes, jungle animals, mosquitoes, and, surprisingly, breathtaking natural beauty. 

Filled with honesty and rich description, Facing the Congo is a sophisticated depiction of today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country brought to its knees by a succession of despotic leaders. But most mportant, Tayler’s stunning narrative is a deeply satisfying personal journey of fear and awakening, with a message that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt compelled, whether in life or in fantasy, to truly explore and experience our world.

Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness

Drums Along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosur

Featuring the enduring adventures of Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy, this collection includes some of Herge's best-known stories."

The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 1: Tintin in the Land of the Soviets / Tintin in the Congo (Tintin, #1-2)

Twain's biting satire on the gruesome Belgian reign over the Congo. Rarely included in Twain collections.‏

King Leopold's Soliloquy

A foreign correspondent's gripping account of his experiences in Congo, told through the long scope of the country's dark and brutal history.
After covering a brutal war that claimed four million lives, journalist Bryan Mealer takes readers on a harrowing two-thousand-mile journey through Congo, where gun-toting militia still rape and kill with impunity. Amid burned-out battlefields, the dark corners of the forests, and the high savanna, where thousands have been massacred and quickly forgotten, Mealer searches for signs that Africa's most troubled nation will soon rise from ruin.
At once illuminating and startling, "All Things Must Fight to Live" is a searing portrait of an emerging country devastated by a decade of war and horror and now facing almost impossible odds at recovery, as well as an unflinching look at the darkness and greed that exists in the hearts of men. It is nonfiction at its finest--powerful, moving, necessary.

All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo

Abandoned by both his Irish father and Congolese mother, Bruno Salvador has long looked for someone to guide his life. He has found it in Mr. Anderson of British Intelligence.Bruno's African upbringing, and fluency in numerous African languages, has made him a top interpreter in London, useful to businesses, hospitals, diplomats-and spies. Working for Anderson in a clandestine facility known as the "Chat Room," Salvo (as he's known) translates intercepted phone calls, bugged recordings, snatched voice mail messages. When Anderson sends him to a mysterious island to interpret during a secret conference between Central African warlords, Bruno thinks he is helping Britain bring peace to a bloody corner of the world. But then he hears something he should not have....Building upon the box office success of le Carre's The Constant Gardener (like THE MISSION SONG, built around turmoil and conspiracy in Africa) and le Carre's laser eye for the complexity of the modern world (seen in Absolute Friends' prediction that the Iraq war would be based on phony and manipulated intelligence), this new novel is a crowning achievement, full of politics, heart, and the sort of suspense that nobody in the world does better.

The Mission Song

The Trouble with the Congo suggests a new explanation for international peacebuilding failures in civil wars. Drawing from more than 330 interviews and a year and a half of field research, it develops a case study of the international intervention during the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s unsuccessful transition from war to peace and democracy (2003–2006). Grassroots rivalries over land, resources, and political power motivated widespread violence. However, a dominant peacebuilding culture shaped the intervention strategy in a way that precluded action on local conflicts, ultimately dooming the international efforts to end the deadliest conflict since World War II. Most international actors interpreted continued fighting as the consequence of national and regional tensions alone. UN staff and diplomats viewed intervention at the macro levels as their only legitimate responsibility. The dominant culture constructed local peacebuilding as such an unimportant, unfamiliar, and unmanageable task that neither shocking events nor resistance from select individuals could convince international actors to reevaluate their understanding of violence and intervention.

The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding

Le héros de "Black Bazar" est un dandy africain de notre temps, amoureux des cols italiens et des chaussures Weston, qui découvre sa vocation d'écrivain au détour d'un chagrin d'amour. Naviguant entre complainte et dérision, il brosse avec truculence un tableau sans concession de la folie du monde qui l'entoure. Tour à tour burlesque et pathétique, son récit va prêter sa voix à toute une galerie de personnages étonnants, illustrant chacun à leur manière la misère et la grandeur de la condition humaine. Un roman à la verve endiablée, tournant le dos aux convenances et aux idées reçues, par l'une des voix majeures de la littérature francophone actuelle.

Black bazar

A forceful argument against America's vicious circle of growing inequality by the Nobel Prize–winning economist.

America currently has the most inequality, and the least equality of opportunity, among the advanced countries. While market forces play a role in this stark picture, politics has shaped those market forces. In this best-selling book, Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz exposes the efforts of well-heeled interests to compound their wealth in ways that have stifled true, dynamic capitalism. Along the way he examines the effect of inequality on our economy, our democracy, and our system of justice. Stiglitz explains how inequality affects and is affected by every aspect of national policy, and with characteristic insight he offers a vision for a more just and prosperous future, supported by a concrete program to achieve that vision.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

FEYRE WILL BRING VENGEANCE.

She has left the Night Court - and her High Lord - and is playing a deadly game of deceit. In the Spring Court, Tamlin is making deals with the invading king threatening to bring Prythian to its knees, and Feyre is determined to uncover his plans. But to do so she must weave a web of lies, and one slip may spell doom not only for Feyre, but for her world as well.

As mighty armies grapple for power, Feyre must decide who to trust amongst the dazzling and lethal High Lords - and hunt for allies in unexpected places. 

BUT WHILE WAR RAGES, IT IS HER HEART THAT WILL FACE THE GREATEST BATTLE.

THE THRILLING THIRD BOOK IN #1 "NEW YORK TIMES" BESTSELLING FANTASY SERIES FROM SARAH J. MAAS.

A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3)

Death in the Congo "is a gripping account of a murder that became one of the defining events in postcolonial African history. It is no less the story of the untimely death of a national dream, a hope-filled vision very different from what the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo became in the second half of the twentieth century.

When Belgium relinquished colonial control in June 1960, a charismatic thirty-five-year-old African nationalist, Patrice Lumumba, became prime minister of the new republic. Yet stability immediately broke down. A mutinous Congolese Army spread havoc, while Katanga Province in southeast Congo seceded altogether. Belgium dispatched its military to protect its citizens, and the United Nations soon intervened with its own peacekeeping troops. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, both the Soviet Union and the United States maneuvered to turn the crisis to their Cold War advantage. A coup in September secretly aided by the UN toppled Lumumba s government. In January 1961, armed men drove Lumumba to a secluded corner of the Katanga bush, stood him up beside a hastily dug grave, and shot him. His rule as Africa s first democratically elected leader had lasted ten weeks.

Fifty years later, the murky circumstances and tragic symbolism of Lumumba s assassination still trouble many people around the world. Emmanuel Gerard and Bruce Kuklick pursue events through a web of international politics, revealing a tangled history in which many people black and white, well-meaning and ruthless, African, European, and American bear responsibility for this crime."

Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba

In the powerful travel-writing tradition of Ryszard Kapuscinski and V.S. Naipaul, a haunting memoir of a dangerous and disorienting year of self-discovery in one of the world's unhappiest countries.

Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo

Written over a century ago, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" continues to dominate our vision of the Congo, unlikely as it might seem that a late-Victorian novella could encapsulate a country roughly equal in size to the United States east of the Mississippi. Conrad's Congo is hell itself, a place where civilization won't take, where literal and metaphor darknesses converge, and where human conduct, unmoored from social (Western, in other words) norms, turns barbaric. As Robert Edgerton shows in this crisply narrated yet sweeping work of history, the Congo is still trying to awaken from the nightmare of its past, struggling to pull free from the grip of the "heart of darkness" cliche. 

Plundered for centuries for its natural resources (which remain Africa's most abundant), the Congo was not always a place of horror. Before the Portuguese landed on its shores at the end of the 15th century, it was a prosperous and thriving region. The Congo River, the world's second longest as well as the deepest, and one of the only routes to the continent's interior, provided indigenous populations with ample means for living and trading. What the Portuguese found first to exploit were people, and with the slave trade began a dizzying downward spiral of conquest and degradation that continued for centuries. By the 19th century the race to explore the full length of the legendary river masked a fight for territorial and moral control among the French, Arabs, British, Germans, as well as American missionaries, all of whom dreamed of possessing Africa's very heart. When King Leopold of Belgium managed to solidify control in 1885, the Congo "question" seemed solved. His reign, of course, was almost pathological in its cruelty-the true source of Conrad's "horror"-and its grim legacy endures to this day.

Edgerton documents the Congo's long, sad history with a sense of empathy with and admiration for the character of the land and its inhabitants. Since independence in June 1960, the country has endured the machinations and disappointments of one dictator after another, beginning with Patrice Lumumba, and continuing through Joseph Mobutu, Laurent Kabila, and today Kabila's son, Joseph, who assumed power after his father was assassinated in January 2001. Whether called the "Congo Free State," or "Zaire," or the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the country remains perilously unstable.

"s20The Troubled Heart of Africa" is the only book to give a complete history of the Congo, filling in the blanks in the country's history before the advent of Henry Stanley, David Livingstone, King Leopold, and other figures, and carrying us straight into today's headlines. The Congo continues today to be the subject of intense speculation and concern, and with good reason: upon it hangs the fate of sub-Sahara Africa as a whole. Here is a book that helps us face the stark truths of the Congo's past and appreciate both the enormous potential and uncertainty of its future.


The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo

A rollicking new novel described as “Oliver Twist in 1970s Africa” ("Les Inrockuptibles") by the finalist for the Man International Booker Prize

It’s not easy being Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. There’s that long name of his for a start, which means, "Let us thank God, the black Moses is born on the lands of the ancestors." Most people just call him Moses. Then there’s the orphanage where he lives, run by a malicious political stooge, Dieudonné Ngoulmoumako, and where he’s terrorized by two fellow orphans—the twins Songi-Songi and Tala-Tala.

But after Moses exacts revenge on the twins by lacing their food with hot pepper, the twins take Moses under their wing, escape the orphanage, and move to the bustling port town of Pointe-Noire, where they form a gang that survives on petty theft. What follows is a funny, moving, larger-than-life tale that chronicles Moses’s ultimately tragic journey through the Pointe-Noire underworld and the politically repressive world of Congo-Brazzaville in the 1970s and 80s.

Mabanckou’s vivid portrayal of Moses’s mental collapse echoes the work of Hugo, Dickens, and Brian DePalma’s "Scarface", confirming Mabanckou’s status as one of our great storytellers. "Black Moses" is a vital new extension of his cycle of Pointe-Noire novels that stand out as one of the grandest, funniest, fictional projects of our time.


Petit Piment

It is 1914 when Marcus Garvey, a bedraggled British manservant, emerges from the depths of the Belgian Congo. He is the sole survivor of an ill-fated mining expedition in which both his masters, William and Richard Craver, died and from which their African porters fled. Garvey returns to London carrying two diamonds of extraordinary size, spinning a story too unspeakably terrifying to be believed. He is promptly arrested. 

Tommy Thompson, a London ghostwriter for a ghostwriter for a ghostwriter (don't ask!), is approached by his attorney to document Garvey's unholy African odyssey. From his prison cell awaiting the murder trial, Garvey recounts the mind-boggling horror that the Craver mining expedition encountered in the dark recesses of the Congo. 

Exactly how did the Craver brothers die? What unearthly forces would drive men to commit such acts of immeasurable brutality? Could love have possibly bloomed in the heart of such darkness? Only Tommy can untangle the mysteries of the Garvey case. A brilliant literary pastiche and tongue-in-cheek pulp African adventure, Pandora in the Congo is, at its heart, a fabulist literary exploration of imagination, reminding us that there is rarely one version to any story, and always more than meets the eye.

Pandora in the Congo

A young woman follows her fiancé to war-torn Congo to study extremely endangered bonobo apes - who teach her a new truth about love and belonging.

In 2005, Vanessa Woods accepted a marriage proposal from a man she barely knew and agreed to join him on a research trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country reeling from a brutal decade-long war that had claimed the lives of millions. Settling in at a bonobo sanctuary in Congo's capital, Vanessa and her fiancé entered the world of a rare ape with whom we share 98.7 percent of our DNA. She soon discovered that many of the inhabitants of the sanctuary - ape and human alike - are refugees from unspeakable violence, yet bonobos live in a peaceful society in which females are in charge, war is nonexistent, and sex is as common and friendly as a handshake. 

A fascinating memoir of hope and adventure, Bonobo Handshake traces Vanessa's self-discovery as she finds herself falling deeply in love with her husband, the apes, and her new surroundings while probing life's greatest question: What ultimately makes us human? Courageous and extraordinary, this true story of revelation and transformation in a fragile corner of Africa is about looking past the differences between animals and ourselves, and finding in them the same extraordinary courage and will to survive. For Vanessa, it is about finding her own path as a writer and scientist, falling in love, and finding a home.

Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo

The bestselling, classic text on one anthropologist’s incredible experience living among the African Mbuti Pygmies, and what he learned from their culture, customs, and love of life.

In this bestselling book, Colin Turnbull, a British cultural anthropologist, details the incredible Mbuti pygmy people and their love of the forest, and each other. Turnbull lived among the Mbuti people for three years as an observer, not a researcher, so he offers a charming and intimate firsthand account of the people and their culture, and especially the individuals and their personalities. "The Forest People" is a timeless work of academic and humanitarian significance, sure to delight readers as they take a trip into a foreign culture and learn to appreciate the joys of life through the eyes of the Mbuti people.

The Forest People

The feats of the hero Mwindo are here glorified in the bilingual text of an epic which was sung and narrated in a Bantu language and acted out by a member of the Nyanga tribe in the remote forest regions of eastern Zaire. Admirably structured, coherent, and richly poetic, the epic is in prose form, interspersed with song and proverbs in verse. An example of the classic tradition of oral folk literature, the tale has important implications for the comparative study of African culture, as the text provides profound insights into the social structure, value system, linguistics, and cosmology of this African people.

The Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga

After New York businessman Lewis Burke's plane makes an emergency landing in a remote area in Congo basin, armed rebels seize the aircraft, forcing Lewis to flee into the rainforest. As he struggles to survive the unrelenting heat, battling thirst and hunger, he confronts his darkest fears and greatest disappointments: his crumbling marriage; his distant relationship with his seven-year-old son, Shane; and the lack of meaning in his life. 
 When Lewis's wife, Helen, discovers that he has disappeared, she dares to search for him herself. As she and Shane trek upriver into the forbidding forest, thwarded at every turn by the military conflict raging around them, the boy's visions and dreams of his father give Helen hope. Meanwhile, Lewis is rescued -- and ushered deeper into the jungle -- by a young Congolese boy, who helps him find a side of himself he thought he'd lost. 
 A stirring adventure, "The Curve of the World" is a riveting story about crossing barriers and regaining love, and about the resilience and tenacity of the human spirit.

The Curve of the World: A Novel

Lisa Shannon had a good life — a successful business, a fiancé, a home, and security. Then one day in 2005, an episode of "Oprah" changed her life. The show focused on women in Congo, a place known as the worst place on earth to be a woman. She was suddenly awakened to the atrocities there — millions dead, women being raped, children dying in shocking numbers. It was then that Lisa realized she had to do something — and she did. "A Thousand Sisters" is Lisa Shannon’s inspiring memoir. She shares her story of how she raised money to sponsor Congolese women beginning with one solo 30-mile run and then founded a national organization, Run for Congo Women. The book chronicles her journeys to the Congo, meeting the sponsored women and hearing their stories. Along the way Lisa is forced to confront herself and learns lessons of survival, fear, gratitude, and love from the women of Africa. "A Thousand Sisters" is a deeply moving call to action for each person to find in them the thing that brings meaning to a wounded world.

A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita was a young Kongolese woman who in 1704 claimed to be possessed by St. Anthony, argued that Jesus was a Kongolese, criticized Italian Capuchin missionaries for not supporting black saints, and attempted to stop the devastating cycle of civil wars between contenders for the Kongolese throne. She was burned at the stake in 1706. Background information is supplied on Kongo, the development of Catholicism there, and the role of local warfare in the Atlantic slave trade.

The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706

The Tragic State Of The Congo: From Decolonization To Dictatorship

Why would a young American doctor abruptly give up a comfortable life in Kansas in order to work in Congo?not once but twice? In 1961 Roger Youmans took his wife and two young daughters with him to work in a country whose people had suffered terribly as a result of tribal warfare and general political upheaval. Congo at that time had no trained physicians and most of the foreign doctors had fled the country. The medical system had collapsed, and the Congolese people were battling malaria, smallpox, and starvation. Roger Youmans was drawn to the country precisely because of its overwhelming needs. Yet he spoke only the most rudimentary French and considered himself totally unprepared for the problems he would soon face on the wards of the mission hospital to which he had been assigned. But slowly and often with amusing results, he and his family began to adjust to life in Congo. When Bull Elephants Fight is both a vivid account of Youmans? medical experiences and an honest and deeply personal description of an American family's struggle to embrace a vastly different culture. Eventually Youmans would venture deeper into the heart of Congo where there were no medical facilities. This experience would bring him in direct contact with Mobutu, the charismatic president who fostered the idea of ?authenticity? for the country (which he renamed Zaire) but whose motives and tactics were often questionable. In the course of working on Mobutu's riverboat hospital, Youmans gives us a fascinating glimpse of this powerful dictator. A master storyteller, Youmans writes with warmth and compassion about the Congolese people, who have for so long been trampled like the grass whenever the ?bullelephants the tribal warlords and ruthless politicians?begin to fight. His story will make you want to figure out how you can reach out to those in need and begin to make a difference in this world.

When Bull Elephants Fight: An American Surgeon's Chronicle of Congo

In the early 1960s, twenty five-year-old Veronica Cecil decided to move to the Congo with her husband when he was offered a good post at a large multi-national company. Filled with enthusiasm for their new life the couple and their eleven-month-old son set off for an African adventure . . .
 
But Veronica arrived to find a newly independent country in chaos after the murder of the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba and she was forced to face realities such as food shortages and the internal politics and tension between the locals and the colonials in the capital, Leopoldville. Six months after their arrival in the Congo, they were finally sent to Elizabetha, a remote palm oil plantation on the banks of the Congo River.
 
It’s during their stay in Elizabetha that brutal civil war broke out. The rebels had captured the neighbouring town of Stanleyville and taken all the whites hostage. Despite the fact that Veronica was on the verge of giving birth, the situation was so dangerous that she and her toddler were to be evacuated. Leaving her husband and all their possessions behind, she and her son began on a two-day journey through the jungle. But on the plane back to Leopoldville, the first labour pains began . . .

Congo

Congo

Michael Crichton

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Picador Classic)

Adam Hochschild

Congo: The Epic History of a People

David Van Reybrouck

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Jason K. Stearns

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo

Michela Wrong

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver

Congo Stories: Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed

John Prendergast

Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

Gérard Prunier

Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo

Ernesto Che Guevara

The Congo from Leopold to Kabila: A People's History

Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja

The Catastrophist: A Novel

Ronan Bennett

The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair

Michael Deibert

A Burnt-Out Case

Graham Greene

No Mercy: A Journey to the Heart of the Congo

Redmond O'Hanlon

Spies in the Congo: The Race for the Ore That Built the Atomic Bomb

Susan Williams

The Assassination of Lumumba

Ludo De Witte

Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness

Jeffrey Tayler

Drums Along the Congo: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosur

Rory Nugent

The Adventures of Tintin, Volume 1: Tintin in the Land of the Soviets / Tintin in the Congo (Tintin, #1-2)

Hergé

King Leopold's Soliloquy

Mark Twain

All Things Must Fight to Live: Stories of War and Deliverance in Congo

Bryan Mealer

The Mission Song

John le Carré

The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding

Severine Autesserre

Black bazar

Alain Mabanckou

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future

Joseph E. Stiglitz

A Court of Wings and Ruin (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #3)

Sarah J. Maas

Death in the Congo: Murdering Patrice Lumumba

Emmanuel Gerard

Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo

Anjan Sundaram

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa

Jason K. Stearns

The Troubled Heart of Africa: A History of the Congo

Robert B. Edgerton

Petit Piment

Alain Mabanckou

Pandora in the Congo

Albert Sánchez Piñol

Bonobo Handshake: A Memoir of Love and Adventure in the Congo

Vanessa Woods

The Forest People

Colin M. Turnbull

The Mwindo Epic from the Banyanga

Anonymous

The Curve of the World: A Novel

Marcus Stevens

A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman

Lisa J. Shannon

The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706

John K. Thornton

The Tragic State Of The Congo: From Decolonization To Dictatorship