Word: belgiums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Late in the 1890s, a young shipping executive named Edmund Dene Morel stands on the shipping docks of Antwerp, Belgium. Amidst the hustle and bustle of ships destined for the Congo, he meticulously records trade statistics for his employer, the shipping firm Elder Dempster. As Morel watches the sailors unload case after case of rubber and ivory from the incoming ships, he suddenly notices that the numbers don't match up. In these brief moments, standing on the dock in Antwerp, Morel finds himself amidst one of the largest slave-operations of this century...
...Hochschild is at no loss for characters in this story; one of the earliest we meet is Sir Henry Morton Stanley, of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" fame. Stanley is hired by King Leopold II of Belgium--according to one of Leopold's best PR men, Henry Shelton Sanford--in order to create "a chain of posts or hospices, both hospitable and scientific, which should serve as means of information and aid to travelers...and ultimately, by their humanizing influences, to secure the abolition of the traffic in slaves." Stanley was the first to betray this rhetoric in service to Leopold...
...killings and the movement itself and is written with just as much eloquence. Hochschild offers a multi-leveled rationale for this forgetting, but concludes that perhaps the chief cause lies in the beginnings of the First World War and the Allies' politically advantageous characterization of "Poor Little Belgium...
What does it take to satisfy a man? Well, if it's in Belgium, it's probably extra cheese. Yes, sweetie pie has taken a backseat to a different dish in the land of Liege, at least according to an interactive information service. If one is to believe the data accumulated by Scoot, a venture that provides toll-free information both online and over the phone, what really makes Brussels sprout is information on where to score a hot, saucy... pizza...
...ache through my bones, I stir in bed and the memories rise out of me like a buzz of flies from a carcass." The memories, eloquently relived and regretted, are of grotesque cultural arrogance, unraveling in a very small place. Rumblings of the Congo's struggle for independence from Belgium--and U.S. plotting to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, the new nation's first Prime Minister--are distant thunder in Kingsolver's tale. Her story, a symbolic parallel to the national upheaval, takes place in an isolated village. Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist preacher, fanaticism in bitter parody, lugs his wife, daughters...