cover image The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness

The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man's Battle for Human Rights in South America's Heart of Darkness

Jordan Goodman, . . Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26 (322pp) ISBN 978-0-374-13840-0

Goodman (The Rattlesnake ), an honorary research associate at London's Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, chronicles the dangerous 1910s quest of British activist Roger Casement to publicize the human rights abuses against local Indians by brutal Peruvian rubber baron Julio César Arana's Peruvian Amazon Company. British envoy Casement's 700-plus–page report on the mass violence and deaths of 30,000 natives to produce an international rubber surplus was published by the House of Commons, and Arana's empire was eventually dismantled, but not before economic and political pressures were used to threaten Casement and Britain's global colonial policy as well. The book is most fascinating when detailing Arana's bold skirmishes with Casement in the media and in the courts. Well researched and exquisitely told, Goodman's account of one brave man bringing down a cruel business empire is worthy of attention. 8 pages of b&w illus.(Feb.)