Books: Congo King

LEOPOLD THE UNLOVED—Ludwig Bauer —Little, Brown ($3.50).

To readers now over 50, the name of Leopold II of Belgium on the cover of a book will connote one thing—the Congo atrocities. They will remember appalling stories of hacked-off hands, of burned women, of forced labor. They will recall, perhaps dimly across the abyss of the World War, that the Belgian king who preceded Albert made millions out of "red rubber" and they may recollect that of a population of some 20,000,000 blacks living along the Congo when Henry M. Stanley first traced the river from source to sea only 10,000,000 were left alive when Leopold died in 1909.

Ludwig Bauer, in reanimating these old horrors, darts back & forth continually between two points of view: the things which Leopold II tacitly approved in the Belgian Congo were unspeakable; Leopold was admirable as a great organizer, a promoter in the grand manner, a veritable tycoon among kings, a political genius of the "rarest and most dangerous kind—the genius which does not wish to reveal itself as such." When Herr Bauer is taking morality as his touchstone, Leopold shrivels before one's eyes; when he is taking energy as his talisman, his subject swells to the proportions of a Cecil Rhodes. It is a tribute to Herr Bauer's book that the reader discovers himself possessed of the same ambivalent attitude toward the Congo King when he finishes Leopold the Unloved.