KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST

"Leopold's letters and memos, forever badgering someone about acquiring a colony, seem to be in the voice of a person starved for love as a child and now filled with an obsessive desire for an emotional substitute, the way someone becomes embroiled in an endless dispute with a brother or sister over an inheritance, or with a neighbor over a property boundary.  The urge for more can become insatiable, and its apparent fulfillment seems only to exacerbate that early sense of deprivation and to stimulate the need to acquire still more"--King Leopold's Ghost

King Leopold's Ghost is a fantastic book, but very disturbing.  You may think of the Belgian Congo over a century ago as the world of the past, but I kept seeing our present-day world, with its ruthless international corporations (including Canada's notorious mining companies), bureaucratic dissembling and spin control.

Adam Hochschild has an eye for telling yet entertaining details, like suggesting that ivory was the plastic of the 19th century.  Would you believe that the book Leopold read about managing profitable Java plantations was written by JWB Money?  King Leopold is the sort of historical figure who makes me gasp:  one man can make a terrible difference! (The Germans have a word for people like him: schreibtischentaeter, which means a criminal who works from a desk, Adolf Eichmann being another prime example.) I'm reminded of that moment in Chinatown when Jack Nicholson asks, "How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford?" and John Huston answers, "The future, Mr. Gittes!  The future."

We finished the second season of Top of the Lake.  It wasn't as great as the first one but still pretty good (like the second season of The Crown). Now I want to see In the Cut, another Jane Campion story about a female police detective.

Yesterday my city in the Vikings game suffered five waves of attacks!  I don't mind the loss of resources--they can refill pretty quickly--but what really annoyed me was that I kept trying to start rebuilding my defence forces only to have them wiped away in the blink of an eye. (It didn't help that Thursday I'd spent my whole gold reserve on upgrading resource production and education to accelerate training of soldiers, both of which will help in the long run...) Today I've been using one of my two treaty bonuses that make me safe from attack for a day, and the rebuilding is so complete that I won't need the second just yet.