Hacker News Books

Friends of the Congo: http://www.friendsofthecongo.org/films-a-videos.html has some great resources about this.

Another classic is Heart of Darkness (although a fiction, it tells much about colonialism)

King Leopold's Ghost is also a great read: http://www.amazon.com/King-Leopolds-Ghost-Heroism-Colonial/d...

Learned about Leopold II in high school, Heart Of Darkness was a book we read in class, King Leopold's Ghost is a popular book today.

You could just as easily say that 'No one calls Mao Hitler' as well (though of course many do), as his horrors aren't given the same focus either.

What about Genghis Khan? His exploits killed a significant integer percentage of the entire human race! Yet he's more likely to be revered than compared to Hitler.

The presumption that only black mass murders are skipped over, then, is utter nonsense. Why some are focused on whilst other ignored (or in the case of Genghis, revered) is a mystery. And let us not forget that Genghis even killed white people, just like Hitler!

These are the ones I've liked best

Neal Thompson - "Driving with the Devil: Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels, and the Birth of NASCAR"

Dee Brown - "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"

Nicholas Johnson - "Big Dead Place" - about living in Antartica

Mark Noll - "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis"

David Halberstam - "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War"

Stanley Karnnow - "In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines"

Esmerelda Santiago - "When I was Puerto Rican"

Lara Pawson - "In the Name of the People" (about Angola)

Marc Benioff - "Behind the Cloud" (surprisingly good for a business book)

Keith Anderson - "The Digital Cathedral" (book a friend of mine wrote, hard to describe, but suprised me at how good it is)

Adam Hochschild - "King Leopold's Ghost" (how the Congo became a colony)

Jessica Livingston - "Founders at Work"

"The Singapore Story: The memoirs of Lee Kuan Yew" (a little dry / long at points, but otherwise very instructive)

"Listening spirituality, Vol. 1: Personal Spiritual Practices Among Friends" (a book about Quakerism that was surprisingly good)

Michael Fogus - "Functional Javascript"

David Shi - "The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture" (traces the historical movements in the U.S. that value "simplicity" as a virtue, this was an interesting way to look at history)

A.J. Swoboda and studies, "Blood Cries Out" (recommended to me by someone I know who is in seminary, this is Pentacostal theologians writing about ecology)

Frank Moraes - "The Importance of Being Black" (an Indian journalist in the 60s who took a tour of Africa and wrote a book; his books are hard to find though)

> Facebook is racing to gain the advantage in Africa over rivals like Google and Chinese players including Tencent, in a 21st century version of the “Scramble for Africa.”

That is a really scary thing to have read. Perhaps the New York Times is out of line in using it, but if that metaphor is even 10% accurate that would be very bad.

To give some background, the “Scramble for Africa”
is the only time I’ve ever read the words, where the writer had a serious argument, “was worse than the holocaust”. This was in reference to the mass deaths in the Congo under King Leopold of Belgium, as documented in the book “King Leopold’s Ghost”.

I know a ton of people have died in history and there have been so many wars, but the Scramble for Africa was really really really bad.

Yeah so I guess in conclusion, NY Times shouldn’t have used that phrase, Facebook sucks, and if they (Facebook) mess up almost everywhere please please just not let them mess up the African continent.