Overview
Adam Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942. His first book, Half The Way Home: A Memoir Of Father And Son, was published in 1986. It was followed by The Mirror At Midnight: A South African Journey, and The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. The Unquiet Ghost won the Madeline Dane Ross Award of the Overseas Press Club of America, given to "the best foreign correspondent in any medium showing concern for the human condition. Hochschild's work has also won prizes from the World Affairs Council, the Eugene V. Debs Foundation and the Society of American Travel Writers. An anthology of his shorter pieces, Finding The Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels, won the 1998 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award for the Art of the Essay.Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story Of Greed, Terror And Heroism. In Colonial Africa was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It, Half The Way Home, and The Unquiet Ghost were all named Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. His books have been translated into six languages.
Besides his books, Hochschild has also written for The New Yorker, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, The Nation, and many other newspapers and magazines. He is a former commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered."
Hochschild teaches writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, and has been a guest teacher at other campuses in the U.S. and abroad. In 1997-98, he was a Fulbright Lecturer in India. He lives in San Francisco with his wife Arlie, the sociologist and author. They have two sons.
Editorials
Edward Hower
No recent book can better clarify South Africa's dilemma than 'The Mirror at Midnight,' by Adam Hochschild, a former editor and co-founder of Mother Jones magazine. During his several visits to the country, he visited historic shrines, ob- served political trials, interviewed scores of people in wealthy white suburbs and crowded black townships. He has brought back a thoroughly researched, immensely readable book, a work of vivid reportage and astute political analysis. --San Francisco ChronicleRobin Cohen
There is an old adage that an observer sometimes sees more of the game than a participant. An even better combination is a disinterested observer who none the less shares an intimate connection with his subject. Adam Hochschild, an American re- porter, first saw South Africa as an adolescent accompanying his father on a business trip in the 1950s. He immediately recognized that the country's political convulsions were not merely an inter- nal matter but a moral battleground of worldwide significance, in much the same way as the implications of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Hitler's Germany transcended their immediate context....By cleverly weaving in his own experiences and contempo- rary interviews with the warp and woof of South African history, the author has successfully confronted some key themes unre- solved in a post-apartheid society. He even has the grace to concede that American history is not that dissimilar from that of South Africa and, had the population ratio between native Ameri- cans and white settlers been reversed, a development kindred to apartheid would have emerged. -- Daily Telegraph (London)