In the Forest of No Joy
The Congo-Océan Railroad and the Tragedy of French Colonialism
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Narrated by:
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William DeMeritt
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By:
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J. P. Daughton
About this listen
The epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad and the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.
The Congo-Océan railroad stretches across the Republic of Congo from Brazzaville to the Atlantic port of Pointe-Noir. It was completed in 1934, when Equatorial Africa was a French colony, and it stands as one of the deadliest construction projects in history. Colonial workers were subjects of an ostensibly democratic nation whose motto read “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”, but liberal ideals were savaged by a cruelly indifferent administrative state.
African workers were forcibly conscripted and separated from their families, and subjected to hellish conditions as they hacked their way through dense tropical foliage - a “forest of no joy”; excavated by hand thousands of tons of earth in order to lay down track; blasted their way through rock to construct tunnels; or risked their lives building bridges over otherwise impassable rivers. In the process, they suffered disease, malnutrition, and rampant physical abuse, likely resulting in at least 20,000 deaths.
In the Forest of No Joy captures in vivid detail the experiences of the men, women, and children who toiled on the railroad, and it forces a reassessment of the moral relationship between modern industrialized empires and what could be called global humanitarian impulses - the desire to improve the lives of people outside of Europe. Drawing on exhaustive research in French and Congolese archives, a chilling documentary record, J.P. Daughton tells the epic story of the Congo-Océan railroad and in doing so reveals the human costs and contradictions of modern empire.
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Critic reviews
"Masterful.... what makes it so compelling is the divide it exposes between the often admirable intentions of colonial bureaucrats who did genuinely think they were lifting Africans out of poverty, and the grim reality that they enabled." (The Economist)
"[An] unsparing history.... By highlighting individual stories, Daughton upends the Eurocentric narrative of the documents he studies, in which ‘white triumph would always discount African trauma'." (The New Yorker)
"In this tour de force of historical research, J.P. Daughton tells the horrifying story of the Congo-Océan railroad, a massive, ill-conceived construction project (1921-34) whose French overseers doomed some 20,000 African workers to die. This story, revealing as it does France’s imperial hubris and callous disregard of human suffering, should have been told a long time ago. But it has been buried by bureaucrats, overlooked by historians, and made invisible to those who chose not to see. We owe Daughton a great debt for bringing it to light and for masterfully adding a new chapter to the tragic history of Central Africa under European colonial rule." (Edward Berenson, department chair and professor of history, New York University, and author of The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town)
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- By: Amitav Ghosh
- Narrated by: Sam Dastor
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis.
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performance....
- By Bonnie on 11-15-22
By: Amitav Ghosh
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The Third Reich in History and Memory
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 70 years since the demise of the Third Reich, there has been a significant transformation in the ways in which the modern world understands Nazism. In this brilliant and eye-opening collection, Richard J. Evans offers a critical commentary on that transformation, exploring how major changes in perspective have informed research and writing on the Third Reich in recent years. Drawing on his most notable writings, Evans reveals the shifting perspectives on Nazism's rise to political power, its economic intricacies, and its subterranean extension into postwar Germany.
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each book is better than the first. your writing is genius
- By Anonymous User on 05-10-24
By: Richard J. Evans
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Pox
- An American History
- By: Michael Willrich
- Narrated by: K. Todd Freeman
- Length: 14 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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At the turn of the last century, a smallpox epidemic swept the United States. The age-old disease spread swiftly through an increasingly interconnected American landscape: from southern plantations to the immigrant neighborhoods of northern cities to far-flung villages on the edges of the American empire. In Pox, historian Michael Willrich offers a gripping chronicle of how the nation's continent-wide fight against smallpox launched one of the most important civil liberties struggles of the 20th century.
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Best book on smallpox
- By Chris M. White on 09-07-21
By: Michael Willrich
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Tombstone
- The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962
- By: Yang Jisheng, Edward Friedman - editor/introduction, Stacy Mosher - translator/editor, and others
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu
- Length: 22 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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An estimated 36 million Chinese men, women, and children starved to death during China's Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early '60s. One of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as "the three years of natural disaster". As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent 20 years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father.
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A must read if you are interested in evil
- By Pat Gifford on 06-30-21
By: Yang Jisheng, and others
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Progress
- Ten Reasons to Look Forward to the Future
- By: Johan Norberg
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 6 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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It's on the television, in the papers, and in our minds. Every day we're bludgeoned by news of how bad everything is - financial collapse, unemployment, growing poverty, environmental disasters, disease, hunger, war. But the rarely acknowledged reality is that our progress over the past few decades has been unprecedented. By almost any index you care to identify, things are markedly better now than they have ever been for almost everyone alive.
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Global Uptrends That May Surprise You
- By Alexandra Hopkins on 09-22-17
By: Johan Norberg
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The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism
- The Political Economy of Human Rights - Volume I
- By: Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman
- Narrated by: Brian Jones
- Length: 15 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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A brilliant, shattering, and convincing account of United States-backed suppression of political and human rights in the Third World... It relentlessly dissects the official views of Establishment scholars and their journals. The "best and brightest" pundits of the status quo emerge from this audiobook thoroughly denuded of their credibility.
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must listen
- By Amazon Customer on 09-14-20
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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Monsoon
- The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: John Pruden
- Length: 13 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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On the world maps common in America, the Western Hemisphere lies front and center, while the Indian Ocean region all but disappears. This convention reveals the geopolitical focus of the now-departed 20th century, but in the 21st century, that focus will fundamentally change. In this pivotal examination of the countries known as “Monsoon Asia”—which include India, Pakistan, China, Indonesia, Burma, Oman, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Tanzania—best-selling author Robert D. Kaplan explains how crucial this dynamic area has become to American power.
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A map is worth a thousand words ...
- By Loren on 06-03-12
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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Unworthy Republic
- The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
- By: Claudio Saunt
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.
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A Slow Burn
- By Hervé DuThé on 04-20-20
By: Claudio Saunt
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The Tragedy of Liberation
- A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957
- By: Frank Dikotter
- Narrated by: Bruce Mann
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Following the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949, after a bloody civil war, Mao hoisted the red flag over Beijing's Forbidden City, and the world watched as the Communist revolution began to wash away the old order. Due to the secrecy surrounding the country's records, little has been known before now about the eight years that followed, preceding the massive famine and Great Leap Forward. The Tragedy of Liberation bears witness to a shocking, largely untold history.
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I don't believe this is read by a real person
- By Bjornie Herjolfson on 09-16-20
By: Frank Dikotter
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After the Cataclysm
- The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II
- By: Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman
- Narrated by: Brian Jones
- Length: 13 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Dissects the aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia, the refugee problem, the Vietnam/Cambodia conflict, and the Pol Pot regime.
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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Dirty Work
- Essential Jobs and the Hidden Toll of Inequality in America
- By: Eyal Press
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 11 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Drone pilots who carry out targeted assassinations. Undocumented immigrants who man the "kill floors" of industrial slaughterhouses. Guards who patrol the wards of America's most violent and abusive prisons. In Dirty Work, Eyal Press offers a paradigm-shifting view of the moral landscape of contemporary America through the stories of people who perform society's most ethically troubling jobs. As Press shows, we are increasingly shielded and distanced from an array of morally questionable activities that other, less privileged people perform in our name.
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A Must Read for Conservatives
- By Nice guy on 11-05-21
By: Eyal Press
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This Land Is Their Land
- The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving
- By: David J. Silverman
- Narrated by: William Roberts
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In March 1621, when Plymouth’s survival was hanging in the balance, the Wampanoag sachem (or chief), Ousamequin (Massasoit), and Plymouth’s governor, John Carver, declared their people’s friendship for each other and a commitment to mutual defense. Later that autumn, the English gathered their first successful harvest and lifted the specter of starvation. Ousamequin and 90 of his men then visited Plymouth for the 'First Thanksgiving'. The treaty remained operative until King Philip’s War in 1675, when 50 years of uneasy peace between the two parties would come to an end.
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This factual presentation is lasting
- By marwalk on 04-10-20
What listeners say about In the Forest of No Joy
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Dorothy
- 11-27-24
The repetitiveness of the violence
Unrelenting description of the inhumane, racist policies of the French in Equatorial Africa.1, 2
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- Jim Naibert
- 10-30-21
disappointed
I was expecting information about the physical building of the road as well as about the people who built it and their trials. But went on and on about the terrible treatment the workers got, so much so that I got sick of the negativity and stopped without finishing, though went twice as far inti the book as I should have. Disappointing
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