Subscribe For more videos King Leopold’s Ghost & The Professor and the Madman: Author Speeches (1998) King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) is a best-selling popular history book by Adam Hochschild that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II of Belgium between 1885 and 1908, as well as the atrocities that were committed during that period.[1]
The book aims to increase public awareness of crimes committed by European colonial rulers in Africa. It was refused by nine of the ten U.S. publishing houses to which an outline was submitted, but became an unexpected bestseller and won the prestigious Mark Lynton History Prize for literary style. It also won the 1999 Duff Cooper Prize. By 2013, more than 600,000 copies were in print in a dozen languages.
The book is the basis of a 2006 documentary film of the same name, directed by Pippa Scott and narrated by Don Cheadle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Leopold%27s_Ghost
The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words is a book by Simon Winchester that was first published in England in 1998. It was retitled The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary in the United States and Canada.
It tells the story of the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and one of its most prolific early contributors, Dr. W. C. Minor, a retired United States Army surgeon. Minor was, at the time, imprisoned in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, near the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire, England. The ‘professor’ of the American title is the chief editor of the OED during most of the project, Sir James Murray. Murray was a talented linguist and had other scholarly interests, and he had taught in schools and worked in banking. Faced with the enormous task of producing a comprehensive dictionary, with a quotation illustrating the uses of each meaning of each word, and with evidence for the earliest use of each, Murray had turned to an early form of crowdsourcing (a word not coined until the 21st century)— enlisting the help of dozens of amateur philologists as volunteer researchers.
A journalist with three decades of experience, and the author of a dozen travel-inspired books, Winchester’s initial proposal to write a book about an obscure lexicographer met with rejection. Only when Harper Collins editor Larry Ashmead read the proposal and championed the book did Winchester pursue the necessary research in earnest.[1] Of the project Ashmead said “we can make lexicography cool”.[2] It was Ashmead that persuaded Winchester to call the US edition The Professor and the Madman (over Winchester’s objection that Murray was not a professor), saying “No one here knows what the hell a Crowthorne is.”[2]
The book was a major success.[3][4][5] Winchester went on to write The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary (2003) about the broader history of the OED.
The movie rights for the book were bought by Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions in 1998, but as of 2012 production has not begun. John Boorman wrote a script and was at one time tapped to direct, as was Luc Besson.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surgeon_of_Crowthorne Tarih 2k video var 1 Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-1886) played the key role in the project’s first months, but his Church of England appointment as Dean of Westminster meant …
I review Adam Hochschild’s popular history, King Leopold’s Ghost, the gripping story of how the Belgian Congo was colonized, exploited, and eventually freed.
Lecture by Adam Hochschild, University of California, Berkeley March 16, 2014 Getty Center Journalist, historian, and author of “King Leopold’s Ghost” Adam …
Documentary about how King Leopold II of Belgium acquired Congo as a colony and exploited it by reign of terror. This documentary describes how King …
King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) is a best-selling popular history book by Adam Hochschild that explores the exploitation of the Congo Free State by King Leopold II …
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