List of Illustrations
Introduction

The Surveillance State
1 • Lessons from a Dark Time
2 • Students as Spies
3 • Hoover’s Secret Empire
4 • The Father of American Surveillance
5 • Prison Madness

Africa
6 • The Listening House
7 • All That Glitters
8 • A Showman in the Rainforest
9 • Heart of Darkness: Fiction or Reportage?
10 • On the Campaign Trail with Nelson Mandela

India
11 • India’s American Imports
12 • Palm Trees and Paradoxes
13 • The Brick Master
14 • The Impossible City

Europe
15 • Our Night with Its Stars Askew
16 • Shortstops in Siberia
17 • A Homage to Homage
18 • On Which Continent Was the Holocaust Born?
19 • Sunday School History

America
20 • Pilot on the Great River: Mark Twain’s Nonfiction
21 • A Literary Engineer
22 • A Nation of Guns

The Continent of Words
23 • You Never Know What’s Going to Happen Yesterday
24 • Practicing History without a License
25 • On the Road Again
26 • Books and Our Souls

Acknowledgments
Article Sources
Photo Credits

“Adam Hochschild’s brilliant and sprawling books on inhumanity and injustice have made him an international treasure. Now we have Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays, written with the same careful craft and indignant eloquence that we’ve come to admire so much.”—Jeffrey Toobin, author of American Heiress; staff writer, New Yorker; and chief legal analyst, CNN

“This book reveals Adam Hochschild’s journalism in all its glory. His facts are like jewels, luminous in their importance. As a reporter and historian, he turns facts into stories so dynamic and vivid that I couldn’t put the book down. This is important work by a gifted writer at the top of his game.”—Elizabeth Farnsworth, author, filmmaker, former chief correspondent, PBS NewsHour

“Lessons From a Dark Time is an elegant collection that showcases all of Adam Hochschild’s singular talents as a master essayist, historian, literary critic, and narrative writer. In search of a fair and humane world, he tackles big issues of social injustice by focusing on particular people, giving us their lives and travails with the grace and nuance of a wise storyteller. These pieces are special and enduring—a chronicle of our time, past and present, told always on an intimate human scale.”—Barry Siegel, Pulitzer Prize winner; Director, Literary Journalism Program, University of California, Irvine

“Lessons from a Dark Time offers us an inspiring but clear-eyed perspective on what has been—and what can be—accomplished through resistance, persistence, and vision. A wonderful book for our time.”—Eric Stover, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley and coauthor of Hiding in Plain Sight: The Pursuit of War Criminals from Nuremberg to the War on Terror

“One wanders through this collection like the proverbial kid in a candy store. All the essential issues of our time are here, from colonialism to surveillance to development to McCarthyism to the life of the revolutionary, all shaped brilliantly into unforgettable stories, all brightly illuminated by Hochschild's bracing intelligence and sparkling prose. Start at Kerala or the Congo and finish in Catalonia or Berkeley. Dip in here and there, or read straight from first page to last. Whatever path you take, Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays is a delightful, vital book.”—Mark Danner, author of Spiral: Trapped in the Forever War

“These timely, trenchant essays offer a concentrated sample of Adam Hochschild's unique gift for illuminating the history of present-day moral conflicts. Their range is amazing, from the Congo to Siberia to Berkeley, but they are united by Hochschild's wry, compassionate sensibility and voice.”—Robert Worth, author of A Rage for Order: The Middle East in Turmoil, from Tahrir Square to ISIS