Sven Lindqvist: "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey Into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1992; paperback, 1996, The New Press)

I noticed this book on Tom Engelhardt's Tom's Review of Books, where it stood out for one thing as one of the few relatively non-new books. It's oddly structured as a travel narrative, where the author is trekking across the Sahara from Algeria down. The trip itself has relatively little to do with Conrad's The Heart of Darkness -- the source of the title -- and the murderous ideologies of the era surrounding it. The notion that the "lesser races" were dying out (as opposed to being killed off) is something that wouldn't occur to us today, given our own experience of the population explosion in Africa, Latin America, etc. That it was dilligently wrapped up with the aura of science was typical of the era, something we should be more conscious of than most people are today.

The story of King Leopold and the Congo has recently been told by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold's Ghost. I read that a few years back; haven't collected notes from it, and should have. The story of the Herero genocide is less well known, but familiar to me from its prominent role in Thomas Pynchon's novel V.

Charles C Mann: 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2006; paperback, 2007, Vintage Books)

This book attempts to sum up the vast range of recent research into the America prior to the European discovery by Columbus in 1492. As such, it jumps around a lot and is rather scattered. The quotes I picked out are even more scattered -- disease and the ease of conquest is one particular theme. Not all of the research is equally new or newsworthy. Some remains very uncertain. We still know much more about the moment of impact than whatever came before, and what we know about the moment of impact has frequently been misunderstood not least because the impact itself profoundly disturbed our findings.