Congo War

At the heart of Africa is Congo, a country the size of Western Europe, bordering nine other nations, that since 1996 has been wracked by a brutal and unstaunchable war in which millions have died. And yet, despite its epic proportions, it has received little sustained media attention. In this deeply reported book, Jason K. Stearns vividly tells the story of this misunderstood conflict through the experiences of those who engineered and perpetrated it.

Sometime in 1965, James Hawes landed in the Congo with cash stuffed in his socks, morphine in his bag, and a basic understanding of his mission: recruit a mercenary navy and suppress the Soviet- and Chinese-backed rebels engaged in guerilla movements against a pro-Western government. He knew the United States must preserve deniability, so he would be abandoned in any life-threatening situation; he did not know that Che Guevara was attempting to export his revolution a few miles away. Cold War Navy SEAL gives unprecedented insight into a clandestine chapter in US history through the experiences of Hawes, a distinguished Navy frogman and later a CIA contractor. His journey began as an officer in the newly-formed SEAL Team 2, where Hawes commanded boats in the CIA's series of covert, hit-and-run raids into North Vietnam. Those raids directly instigated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

Col. Mike Hoare tells how his force of mercenaries, 5 Commando, put down a Comunist-backed rebel uprising in the Congo. As they restored law and order, town by town, he and his men freed 1800 nuns and priests. His men also learned what it means to be real soldiers.

The Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo was described by a 1943 Manhattan Project intelligence report as the "most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world". So long as the United States remained in control of this mine and its supply, it had a world monopoly on the primary material needed to build an atomic bomb. The uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

In his earlier best sellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in the final audiobook in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crisis through selective change - a coping mechanism more commonly associated with personal trauma.

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.

This thoughtful account of Patrice Lumumba provides an insight into why the swift elimination of the legend from the geopolitical developments involving his country plunged Congo into turmoil that it is yet to recover from. Janvier T. Chando highlights Congo's deep trauma as the private possession of King Leopold of Belgium, later as a Belgian colony, and afterward, as a so-called independent state that got disarrayed by a tug-of-war between the cold war rivals. That resulted in the inhuman dictatorship of pro-Western Mobutu Sese Seko, in wars during which millions of Congolese died, in the...

A delegation of OPEC executives and intelligence operatives working deep undercover are taken hostage in Angola and moved across the border into the Congo. The region is recovering from 30 years of civil and tribal war, and international oil contracts are up for grabs, but only if the area can be deemed stable. The standoff must be ended quickly, but the newly appointed Angolan government will not grant Britain permission to deploy the SAS and has charged the woefully under-skilled defense force with rescuing the hostages.

Col. Mike Hoare's favorite book consisting of 21 short stories, giving new insight into the minds and hearts of the adventurers who became mercenary soldiers. It captures the spirit of mercenary soldiering.

Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists are mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes. Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies - all motionless except for one moving image - a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur.

Cobalt Red is the searing first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt.

Author's Note: This book was previously published under the title The Taste of Fear. Given that the story takes place deep in the Congo jungle, a truly terrifying place, I decided it would be a good fit with the World's Scariest Places series. In the jungle, no one can hear you scream. American movie star Scarlett Cox and her husband, hotel tycoon Salvador Brazza, head to Africa to get away and resuscitate their ailing marriage. When robbed of their money and passports, they seek help from the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam on the very day Al Qaeda chooses to bomb it. In an eyeblink they are...

At the heart of Africa is the Congo, a country the size of western Europe. It borders nine other nations, and since 1996 it has been racked by a brutal war in which millions have died. In Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, renowned political activist and researcher Jason Stearns has written a compelling and deeply reported narrative of how Congo became a failed state that collapsed into a war of retaliatory massacres. Stearns brilliantly describes the key perpetrators, many of whom he met personally, and highlights the nature of the political system that brought these people to power.

What will the future hold for this rich country, handed over to the vultures' feast, if not the urgent need and readiness for Congolese people to become aware and seize the opportunity history offers them - to play their rightful role in Africa? For better or worse, the example of the gold-rich Kibali-Ituri region- like many other regions in Africa plagued by “ethnic” conflicts - calls for the deconstruction of the notion of ethnicity/tribe, which manipulators use to justify their crimes: killing and looting. "Use weapons of gold, and nothing will resist you," advised the Oracle of ...

When a group of missionaries get caught up in bloody African civil war, London is forced to act. For the men of 40 Commando, Royal Marines, it should be a quick in and out. A nice clean operation. But what awaits them will test them like never before. And, facing overwhelming odds, this time the skill and raw courage of these legendary fighting men may not be enough....

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it - from garden seeds to Scripture - is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

When Daily Telegraph correspondent Tim Butcher was sent to cover Africa in 2000, he quickly became obsessed with the idea of recreating H. M. Stanley's famous expedition - and travelling alone. Despite warnings that his plan was suicidal, Butcher set out for the Congo's eastern border with just a rucksack and a few thousand dollars hidden in his boots.

The place is the Belgian Congo, "darkest Africa" of the late 19th century. The narrator, Marlow, describes his experiences running a river steamer for the Company and the cruel colonial exploitation that was practiced. Marlow goes into the jungle in search of the mysterious and powerful white trader Kurtz, hoping to find answers and explanations in that shadowy figure's character for the evil surrounding him.

JUNGLE SLAUGHTER It was the only way. Colonel Tobin and his hand-picked warriors bought themselves a job that demanded total victory—the enemy must be wiped out completely...eliminated! Only one complication in the battle plan: There were two enemies! One was General Guevara Lincoln, the giant ex-Black Panther and his army of African rebel tribes. The other was Major Dogger, the brutal South African mercenary leader and his legion of cutthroat soldiers. Tobin. Guevara. Dogger — a triangle of violence that splashes across the Congo with a bloodbath battle seemingly on a primal level. The...

On ne choisit pas sa famille mais le diable a choisi son clan. Alors que Grégoire et Erwan traquent la vérité jusqu'à Lontano, au cœur des ténèbres africaines, Loïc et Gaëlle affrontent un nouveau tueur à Florence et à Paris. Sans le savoir, ils ont tous rendez-vous avec le même ennemi : l'Homme-Clou n'a pas dit son dernier mot. Chez les Morvan, tous les chemins mènent en enfer.