Photo by Spark Media

When I first listened to the book King Leopold’s Ghost on tape a few years ago, I was mesmerized by the true story of the Belgian King’s rule of the Congo. I can still remember standing in our little kitchen long after I’d finished the dishes; hands clad in yellow plastic gloves, reluctant to click off the recorder as I listened to this horrifying tale unfold.
I found myself wondering about the person who had written such a powerful story and I wished I could ask him about the enormous research he’d done in constructing a narrative of King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo. Was the author Adam Hochschild a historian or journalist? We’d recently moved back to the San Francisco Bay Area after living in London through most of the 1990s. Now, after living and working here for a while, I now realize that Adam Hochschild is revered among many journalists and writers for his long commitment to social justice (he was a co-founder of Mother Jones magazine) as well as his generosity in helping other writers find their way.
Adam Hochschild has also long been a star of the Nieman Conference. His eloquence, modesty, and avuncular manner encourage even the greenest reporter to muster the courage to approach him. Sure enough, his talk at this year’s conference was spellbinding as he began with the proposition that “history is too important to leave to the historians.”
He admitted that although he initially worried that historians might feel resentful of him as “an unlicensed interloper,” in fact, the opposite was true. He asked six professional historians to review his most recent book about the British anti-slavery movement, Bury the Chains, to review his text before publication. Five of the six agreed. The result? “They saved me from making dozens of mistakes,” he told a crowd in one of the ballrooms of Boston Sheraton. Some of those historians even gave him literary tips.
He was drawn to writing historical narratives, after a long and distinguished career as a print journalist, because of “the thrill of time-traveling,” he explained, as well as a sense that books on history were likely to last, unlike newspaper stories.
Adam answered many sharp questions from a distinguished group. The first was from Shirley Christian, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times and author of “Before Louis and Clark: The Chouteaus, the French Dynasty that Ruled America’s Frontier. She wondered if Adam would rule out writing a book about a subject if there weren’t many diaries and letters available about or from them. Adam noted that people have found interesting ways of writing about subjects when there isn’t a lot of material available, citing the many biographies written of Shakespeare.
Bloomberg’s Peter Green asked about the opposite problem: what to do if there’s too much research material available. “That’s the toughest thing of all,” said Adam, who continued that he’s working on a book about World War I – a subject on which 140,000 books have been written, though only about 85,000 in English. His approach is to choose characters to tell the story through, and then search out everything he can about their lives.
Miriam Pawel, a former L.A. Times reporter and editor who is nearing completion of her book on the United Farm Workers movement, asked a question that I struggled with in reporting and writing The House of Mondavi: how do you reconcile conflicting memories of the same event? Adam answered with the experience that most newspaper reporters have had in interviewing three or four witnesses at the scene of an accident: “memories are not reliable.” He suggests being honest about the reliability of your source, including flagging any skepticism or doubts you might have about it.
Eric Scigliano, an editor at a Seattle monthly magazine and author of Michelango’s Mountain and Love, War and Circuses, asked if Adam had ever considered abandoning a book project because the subject seemed too esoteric. Adam answered that his literary agent had sent out his proposal for King Leopold’s Ghost to ten editors. Nine rejected, citing a lack of interest in Africa. “The tenth got it,” Adam told the audience, “It’s not a book about Africa, but a book about greed, ambition, and imperialism.”
Since it was first published by Mariner Books in 1998, Bury the Chains has sold 400,000 copies worldwide. It was a National Book Critic Circle finalist, won a J. Anthony Lucas awardn and, most importantly, prompted a radical rethinking of the history of Belgium’s rule of the Congo.
As he told the writers gathered together this Sunday morning, summed up by Hermann Melville in Moby Dick, “to produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme.” So, Adam told us, write about whales, not fleas.