I think this book probably deserves all the praise it's gotten--certainly making the mass murder and extreme violence something that more people know about is admirable. It's pretty well-written, and flows nicely.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, I have Beef. The first has to do with Hochschild's sense of inevitability when it comes to colonization; he uses word like "guaranteed" when it was at no point guaranteed. It seems small, but boy did it rankle--the question of inevitability regarding colonization supports larger structures of white supremacy in really subtle ways. (We won't get into the numerous references to "American Indians" and that whole mess, but needless to say: yikes.)

It struck me also, reading the afterward to the anniversary edition, how different this book would have been if Hochschild wasn't determined to write it in this specific way, ie that thing where popular history writers do the biographic deep dive on every important player in the book. That, more than anything, seemed to be his stumbling block on including African people in his narrative, but what would the book maybe have looked like if he wasn't so tied to that structure? I know, at this point it looks like I'm asking for a different book, but I think it's an important question to ask in light of his obvious responses to "where are the voices of African people in this book?"

(Also quick sidebar: his repeated insistence that colonization is not the only reason that countries in Africa struggle today, and that in fact it has more to do with the cultural patriarchy that exists, is really pretty gross and also holds the "democratic" nation-state as the measure by which we hold success. Relying on the Enlightenment as the Reason why European nation-states are doing better is a deeply slippery slope, my dude.)

Regardless, I can see why people read this, and why it's so popular in classrooms; it is at least a decent introduction to the violences that make up colonization, especially extractive colonization as in this case. Paired with some other work, it could be really instructive, and at the very least is promoting the knowledge of the violence to more readers than before.