'Exterminate All the Brutes'

In a chilling and controversial book, Swedish author Sven Lindqvist recounts the grisly history of nineteenth-century European imperialism and its connection to a legacy of genocide. Moving through present-day Africa while tracing the routes of British conquerors, Lindqvist tells how armed troops massacred 11,000 Sudanese (at a 'cost' of only forty-eight British deaths) in 1898 and how the King of Ashanti was made to kiss the feet of British officers in 1896. Lindqvist doesn't stop in Africa, writing of the extermination of the Tasmanian aborigines and other atrocities inflicted on native people. He then connects those acts with those of the Nazi regime, showing how rampant imperialism sowed the seeds of the Holocaust. This is a moving account of the forces of history.