Hochschild, Adam 1942–

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Hochschild, Adam 1942–

PERSONAL:

Born October 5, 1942, in New York, NY; son of Harold K. (in business) and Mary (an artist) Hochschild; married Arlie Russell (a sociologist and author), June 26, 1965; children: David, Gabriel. Education: Harvard University, A.B. (cum laude), 1963. Politics: "Non-denominational progressive."

ADDRESSES:

Home—San Francisco, CA. Agent—Georges Borchardt, Inc., 136 East 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Freelance writer, 1965—; San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco, CA, reporter, 1965-66; Ramparts (magazine), San Francisco, writer and editor, 1966-68, 1973-74; Mother Jones (magazine), San Francisco, cofounder, 1974, editor and writer, 1976-81, 1986-87. Presidential campaign staff member for Sen. George McGovern, 1972; commentator for National Public Radio in Washington, DC, 1982-83; regents lecturer at University of California at Santa Cruz, 1987; commentator for Public Interest Radio in New York, NY, 1987-88; University of California at Berkeley graduate school of journalism, lecturer and writing instructor, 1992—. Fulbright lecturer in India, 1997-98. Military service: U.S. Army Reserve, 1964-70.

MEMBER:

National Writers Union, National Book Critics Circle, Media Alliance, PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Certificate of Excellence from Overseas Press Club of America, 1981, for Mother Jones article on South Africa; Bryant Spann Memorial Prize, Eugene V. Debs Foundation, 1984, for Mother Jones article on El Salvador; Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son was named a Notable Book of the Year for 1986 by the New York Times Book Review and the American Library Association; Thomas M. Storke International Journalism Award, World Affairs Council, 1987; The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin was named a Notable Book of the Year for 1995 by the New York Times Book Review and Library Journal; Madeline Dane Ross Award, Overseas Press Club of America, 1995, for The Unquiet Ghost; PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay, for Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels; Mark Lynton History Prize of the J. Anthony Lucas Awards, Duff Cooper Prize, Lionel Gelber Prize, and California Book Awards Gold Medal, all for King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, 2005; Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History, Lionel Gelber Prize, and California Book Awards Gold Medal, PEN USA Literary Award for Research Non-Fiction, all for Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves.

WRITINGS:

Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, Viking (New York, NY), 1990.

The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, Viking (New York, NY), 1994.

Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1997.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1998.

(Editor, with Allan Forsyth) Boris Sergievsky, Airplanes, Women and Song: Memoirs of a Fighter Ace, Test Pilot and Adventurer, Syracuse University Press (Syracuse, NY), 1998.

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2005.

Contributor of articles and reviews to periodicals, including Harper's, New Republic, Village Voice, Nation, Washington Monthly, New York Review of Books, New York Times, New Yorker, Granta, and Los Angeles Times. Member of board of directors, Nuclear Times, 1982-89.

SIDELIGHTS:

A cofounder and former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Adam Hochschild has earned a considerable reputation for his reporting on issues of national and international importance. His books The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, focus on apartheid, Stalin's concentration camps, and the conquest of the Congo by King Leopold II of Belgium. Hochschild's autobiography, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, recounts his troubled relationship with his father.

Half the Way Home is "by turns nostalgic and regretful, lyrical and melancholy," wrote New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani. She added that Hochschild "creates a deeply felt portrait of a man and a boy" narrated with "Proustian detail and affection." "Mr. Hochschild illuminates, with rare tact, the situations of fathers and sons," concluded Mary Gordon in the New York Times Book Review, "and he avoids the traps of sentimentality and rancor both."

Hochschild's grandfather, Berthold Hochschild, came from Germany to New York in 1886, where he was one of the founders of a company that eventually became AMAX, Inc., a worldwide mining empire. The Hochschilds rejected their Jewish heritage to better assimilate into the white Gentile majority. Clinching his acceptance into the WASP elite, Berthold's son Harold married Mary Marquand, a white Protestant with excellent social and political connections, when he was forty-nine and she was forty-one. A year later they had a son, Adam.

An only child, Adam Hochschild grew up with all the servants, fine homes, travel, and quality education wealth could provide, and also with all the expectations his anxious parents could place on him. In Gordon's words, Harold Hochschild "believed that the world was a difficult place and that his son was born to run it." Recognized for his benevolence, sound judgment, and irrefutable reason, Harold Hochschild raised his son with the same quiet reserve and emotional detachment he employed with business associates. But although such authoritative tactics worked smoothly with business executives, they came across to Harold's son as domineering, patriarchal, and intimidating. Adam Hochschild's mother adored both her husband and son, but while young Adam was encouraged by her devotion, he also felt betrayed by her failure to intercede on his behalf. "For," as Gordon explained, "he had to believe the justice of his father's criticisms if the mother who adored him went along with them."

Hochschild's break from his father's authority and his parents' world began after a visit to the mines owned by the company his father headed in central Africa. Concern over racial injustice there and in the United States led Hochschild as a young man to join the civil rights movement. A political activist during the 1960s, Hochschild demonstrated against the Vietnam War and joined the leftist ranks of the alternative press, eventually helping to found Mother Jones, named after labor organizer Mary Harris Jones. The self-proclaimed "magazine for the rest of us," Mother Jones brought leftist politics to a large and diverse audience.

The differences between Adam and Harold Hochschild on the surface seem apparent, critics point out, but they are in fact difficult to define. While Adam Hochschild fairly clearly led the life of a 1960s radical, Harold Hochschild was not a stereotypical ruthless entrepreneur. The company the elder Hochschild directed had major holdings in central and southern Africa, where the mines often ran under the oppressive contract labor system, yet, like his peace-activist son, he publicly opposed the Vietnam War. Though he had had many business contacts in China before 1949, he supported the Communist Revolution there. And, unlike many other corporate tycoons, as an ecologist he brought about some of the most effective environmental legislation in New York State. His fatherly disapproval, then, was not so much of his son's political and social beliefs as of his ways of expressing those beliefs. As Richard Eder noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Harold Hochschild's criticism grew "out of concern that Adam was wasting his life."

That Adam Hochschild can so readily illustrate his and his father's similarities as well as their differences adds credibility and depth to his story in critics' eyes. Gordon observed, for example, that "it would indeed have been easy [for Hochschild] to present himself as the hero of the piece and his father as the villain, but he does not." Also adding depth, according to reviewers, is Hochschild's realistic portrayal of the relative peace he and his father attained during the last few years of the elder Hochschild's life. "Half the Way Home isn't only a story of flight. It's also a story of a son's reconciliation with his father," Suzanne Gordon wrote in the Washington Post Book World. Hochschild remembers fondly that eventually his father, as noted by Kakutani, "even hands out gift subscriptions [to Mother Jones,] as an unspoken gesture that he approves, perhaps even takes pride, in his son's vocation." Like other critics, Kakutani noted with relief that there "are no tearful reconciliation scenes between father and son—just as there were never any declarations of overt hostility." The reconciliation takes place quietly, the reviewer observed, and "by the time Harold Hochschild lies dying in a hospital bed, Adam has been able to move toward an acceptance of this difficult man, and even to acknowledge his own love."

Critics compared Hochschild's book favorably with other parent-child reminiscences. Roger W. Fromm, writing in the Library Journal, deemed the book "an honest, sensitive, fascinating portrait of a father-son relationship that is unique, yet one of universal experience." Newsday contributor Merin Wexler praised Half the Way Home as "an intriguing memoir, gently told," adding that Hochschild's book contains memories which are "in themselves remarkable, but his telling makes them doubly so."

Based on his awareness that his family's fortune was derived from mining operations in the African nation of Zambia, Hochschild visited southern Africa while in college. Later visits to the region and extensive research into its history led to Hochschild's The Mirror at Midnight, which combines history, travelogue, and personal interviews to create "one of the most illuminating books ever written on contemporary South Africa," noted Genevieve Stuttaford for Publishers Weekly. During a long journey across the country, Hochschild spoke to the head of a South African neo-Nazi group, members of a rugby team, and to a racially-mixed schoolteacher who had spent time in prison. Their various insights into South African politics and society give a panoramic view of life in that troubled country.

The Unquiet Ghost was inspired by Hochschild' travel to Russia to visit the sites of several former Soviet prison camps and to speak to those people who spent time as prisoners in these camps or worked there as guards. During the reign of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, millions of Russians were arrested and imprisoned as "enemies of the state" and sent to prison camps in the vast Siberian wilderness. Many millions died during their ordeal, while others spent years in hard labor for crimes involving no more than thinking the wrong thoughts in a totalitarian state. Hochschild, explained Robert Legvold in Foreign Affairs, "went to see how people a half-century after the horror now related to it, particularly how its perpetrators and prey now feel." Hochschild found that information about Stalin and his crimes had been suppressed by the communist authorities for decades. He told Progressive interviewer Linda Rocawich that "the standard history text used in every Soviet high school … had ten lines about Stalin—the man who was absolute ruler of the country for twenty-five years. It had absolutely nothing about the Great Purge, in which nineteen million people were arrested and seven million executed outright. It completely skipped over the famines caused by the collectivization of agriculture, in which another, six, seven, eight million died. There was this vacuum, this silence, and the scale of the silence just awed me." Many former prisoners were reluctant to speak about their time in the camps and suppressed memories of that time in their lives. Former guards denied the horrors that prisoners had undergone. "This haunting and powerful report," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, "reveals that the dictator's legacy persists in widespread denial, amnesia, numbness and pervasive fear." "Ultimately," wrote Gilbert Taylor in Booklist, "[Hochschild's] contribution is to seek out witnesses of Stalinism and preserve their ruthlessly realistic testimony."

In King Leopold's Ghost, Hochschild recounts another example of ruthless power and bloody mass murder, this time the conquest of the Congo by Belgian King Leopold II in 1885. The barbaric war of conquest, and the violence with which Leopold ruled his colony, drew the outraged attention of the world. The king's troops dismembered captured enemy troops, forced civilians into slavery to work collecting wild rubber, and slaughtered many others who dared to protest. "Hochschild's superb, engrossing chronicle," wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "focuses on one of the great, horrifying and nearly forgotten crimes of the century." According to Gail M. Gerhart in Foreign Affairs, "Hochschild has assembled the most remarkable facts and dramatis personae, added a keen appreciation for socio-political nuances … and produced a splendid new popular history." A Booklist reviewer called King Leopold's Ghost an "impressively researched history."

Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves is a history of the end of slavery in the British Empire, which it could be said began with the meeting of a dozen abolitionists, most of them Quakers, in London on May 22, 1787. These abolitionists organized opposition to slavery that included a boycott of slave-produced sugar. Most of the slaveholders were British, but the slaves were primarily Africans who were shipped to work on the plantations of the Caribbean. There they grew crops such as cotton, coffee, and sugar to be consumed by the British. They were cruelly treated, beaten, and even killed by their masters. The first major slave revolt, in 1791, was in French St. Domingue, later Haiti, and its success led to the abolishing of slavery by France. The British tried to capture the colony but were defeated by the former slaves. England outlawed slavery in 1833, thirty years before the United States. "Hochshild is a marvellous writer," concluded Leonard Kennedy in Catholic Insight. "This is another fascinating and outstanding work."

Hochschild told CA: "I seem to be one of these people who writes a book on a totally different subject each time. I also tend to get stuck between books, and to think I'm never going to find the right subject for the next one. Although when I do find each subject, I realize that, in one way or another, it is something that's been obsessing me for a long time, even if I haven't recognized it before … I find that there's a sort of magnetic attraction that takes over, that pulls me towards certain people, episodes, bits of history. A person or a situation that seems to embody some moral dilemma."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Hochschild, Adam, Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 15, 1994, Gilbert Taylor, review of The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin, p. 896; March 15, 1999, review of King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, p. 1297; September 1, 2004, Vanessa Bush, review of Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves, p. 2.

Catholic Insight, May, 2006, Leonard Kennedy, review of Bury the Chains, p. 44.

Economist, February 5, 2005, review of Bury the Chains, p. 76.

Foreign Affairs, July-August, 1994, Robert Legvold, review of The Unquiet Ghost, p. 176; March, 1999, Gail M. Gerhart, review of King Leopold's Ghost, p. 158.

Geographical, May, 2005, Mark Lynas, review of Bury the Chains, p. 75.

Journal of British Studies, January, 2006, Hugh Dubrulle, review of Bury the Chains, p. 179.

Library Journal, May 15, 1986, Roger W. Fromm, review of Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son, p. 61; November 15, 2004, Frederick J. Augustyn, Jr., review of Bury the Chains, p. 70.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 15, 1986, Richard Eder, review of Half the Way Home, p. 3.

Nation, February 14, 2005, Daniel Lazare, review of Bury the Chains, p. 23.

Newsday, July 6, 1986, Merin Wexler, review of Half the Way Home; March 20, 1994.

New York Times, June 21, 1986, Michiko Kakutani, review of Half the Way Home, p. 11; September 1, 1998, Michiko Kakutani, review of King Leopold's Ghost, p. B6.

New York Times Book Review, June 15, 1986, Mary Gordon, review of Half the Way Home, p. 7; November, 25, 1990, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, review of The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey, p. 10; March 27, 1994, Paul Goldberg, review of The Unquiet Ghost, p. 6; April 21, 1997, p. 50; September 20, 1998, Jeremy Harding, review of King Leopold's Ghost, p. 8.

Progressive, July, 1994, Linda Rocawich, interview, p. 31.

Publishers Weekly, October 5, 1990, Genevieve Stuttaford, review of The Mirror at Midnight, p. 83; January 17, 1994, review of The Unquiet Ghost, p. 386; July 20, 1998, review of King Leopold's Ghost, p. 195; January 3, 2005, review of Bury the Chains, p. 48.

Washington Post Book World, May 11, 1986, Suzanne Gordon, review of Half the Way Home.