Adam Hochschild

Adam Hochschild (pronunciation: ”Hoch” as in ”spoke”; ”schild” as in ”build”) is the author of ten  books; Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes is his most recent. Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays appeared in 2018, and  Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939, in 2016. Of his earlier books, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the PEN USA Literary Award, the Gold Medal of the California Book Awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 were both finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, collects some of the articles he has done in several decades of writing for various newspapers and magazines. Earlier in his career, he was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, a commentator on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and a co-founder, editor, and writer at Mother Jones magazine. His articles have also been published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. In 2009 he received the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award from the American Historical Association and in 2014 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

At the Graduate School of Journalism in 2018, former PBS NewsHour correspondent Elizabeth Farnsworth interviewed Hochschild about his work (interview starts at 6:00 minutes into the video recording).  Hochschild has also been interviewed about his writing on the Congo by Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes,” and Alison Stewart of PBS, and by Terry Gross of NPR’s “Fresh Air” about Spain in Our Hearts and about To End All Wars.  The text of a print interview with him about his body of work appears here, and a C-SPAN recording of him talking about Lessons from a Dark Time is here. A recent magazine piece of his looking back at the Armistice that ended the First World War, appeared in the New Yorker, as did another article about a very Trumpian moment in American history a hundred years ago. Other subjects he has written about in recent years include  the civil war in eastern Congo, echoes of a particular historical moment in Trump’s demagoguery, a highly unusual museum, a shadowy general who was the father of American surveillance, and an oddly personal connection to the latest Tarzan film.

(Photo of Adam Hochschild by Barbi Reed)

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