SIDDHARTH KARA'S PAGE: THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery; & COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

COBALT RED: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$11.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt.

Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world’s supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.

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My Review: Remember King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa? More than a quarter-century later, that story of exploitation and abuse of human beings from the vilest era of European colonialism had no effect on the world. Handwringing and smug self-assurance that we would never, it can't happen again, are herewith disproved. We did; it did.

And not many of "us" care, or act like we care, or say or do anything to indicate to our corporate masters that we disapprove. After reading this book, maybe a few will take some time to hunt up contact details for their pad/laptop/cellphone manufacturer and let them know...

...

...well, it's pretty much useless to finish that sentence. Siddharth Kara writes his fingers to the bone, he goes hot miserable places, and he comes and tells us the impassioned truth about how our "clean" energy devices depend on the slave labor of millions...so does every plateful of food you eat...and we go full Joker mode...

...and move on.

After reading Author Kara's interviewee who interrupts him to finish the sentence, "...you work in horrible conditions..." with

"No, we work in our graves."

And you and I sit here and stare at our cobalt-powered screens.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE ZORG: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery
SIDDHARTH KARA
St. Martin's Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$15.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

FINALIST for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction! Winner announced 31 March 2026.

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

The Publisher Says: From Pulitzer finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Cobalt Red: A notorious slave ship incident that led to the abolition of slavery in the UK and sparked the US abolitionist movement

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning “care”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

After reaching Africa, the Zorg was captured by a privateer and came under British command. With a new captain and crew, the ship was crammed with 442 slaves and departed in 1781 for Jamaica. But a series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course and running out of water. So a proposition was put forth: Save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves—by throwing dozens of people, starting with women and children, overboard.

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history—sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States.

Siddharth Kara utilizes primary-source research, gripping storytelling, and painstaking investigation to uncover the Zorg’s journey, the lives and fates of the slaves on board, and the mysterious identity of the abolitionist who finally revealed the truth of what happened on the ship.

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My Review: Whistleblowers are reviled by the greedy capitalists because they interfere with the satiation of the actually evil levels of greed that propel acts like these in the book.

There is a reason y'all's religions, one and all, condemn greed. Not that it ever has the tiniest effect on most "religious" people's behavior, nor the behavior of those who claim they work for the common good, nor really any other human being I've ever known. Yes, before some annoying twidgee says it, I include myself.

Like Cobalt Red (q.v.), Author Kara knows exactly what will give you nightmares, and deploys that thing in search of your conscience. It's history, not current events, I hear you echoing my bleat of self-justification. Back to Cobalt Red you should go.

The relief from guilt is the sheer outrageousness of the court case fought over this murderous event. It's something that I definitely see making a huge splash in the press of the day. It would be a Frontline documentary today. In any event, it is historical record, so there is no escaping the ugly truth:
We have known the facts of slavery for generations and done the bare minimum to end it, more to ameliorate our feelings of greed and guilt than because we see the enslaved as real people.

Sleep tight.

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT, humor is hard, but better when hard-edged

PROFESSOR SCHIFF'S GUILT
AGUR SCHIFF (tr. Jessica Cohen)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A stellar novel rendered into a darkly comic, unforgettable narrative by Booker International Prize winning translator Jessica Cohen.

An Israeli professor travels to a fictitious West African nation to trace a slave-trading ancestor, only to be imprisoned under a new law barring successive generations from profiting off the proceeds of slavery. But before departing from Tel Aviv, the protagonist falls in love with Lucile, a mysterious African migrant worker who cleans his house.

Entertaining and thought-provoking, this satire of contemporary attitudes toward racism and the legacy of colonialism examines economic inequality and the global refugee crisis, as well as the memory of transatlantic chattel slavery and the Holocaust. Is the professor’s passion for Africa merely a fashionable pose and the book he's secretly writing about his experience there nothing but a modern version of the slave trade?

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My Review: I'm willing to bet that most people squirm just reading the synopsis. It's a reckoning with the long shadow of chattel slavery and its ties to Jewish merchants.

I think the best choice Author Schiff made was to tell the story in a comedic register, relying on farcical coincidences of crime and punishment to acknowledge past harms while lampooning present ones caused by some clumsy, bureaucratic attempt at balancing cosmic scales.

The far more interesting point Author Schiff makes, to me at least, is the sheer ubiquity of the mental construct of Africa as lesser, as broken and needing "us" to fix it. The way Professor Schiff approaches his putative project in the narrative begs the question "why are you doing this?"

As a meditation on white guilt versus White Guilt, I think it's a great contribution to necessary conversations about Jewish complicity in the crimes of chattel slavery. As a novel about an individual man's coming to self-awareness, it felt...off.

The parallels drawn between Ancestor Schiff and his appropriation of the slavegirl, and Storyteller Schiff and his relationship to his cleaner, weren't that successful in my reading eyes. They felt as performative as the arrest and legal proceedings of Storyteller Schiff did, without the sharp edge of satire to make them cut my tough hide of willful ignorance. As a result, I was more squicked out than I was challenged to contemplate the real meaning of these sexual crimes. In fact I felt less sympathy for Ancestor Schiff before Storyteller Schiff's peccadillo was brought in. I think the opposite was intended.

I know that could really be a "me" thing, but I bring it up to alert readers who find sexual exploitation deeply unpleasant that this could decrease their reading pleasure.

I'm not as delighted by the read as others were but I am happy to have read a reckoning with an underrepresented crime of historical complicity.