The Dead Do Not Die

One of our most original writers on race, colonialism, and genocide, Sven Lindqvist has a signature approach—uniting travelogues with powerful acts of historical excavation and truth-telling—that makes his books as unforgettable as they are devastating. Here two of his most important works are brought together for the first time in a single volume, with a new introduction by Adam Hochschild. In “Exterminate All the Brutes”, Lindqvist uses Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a point of departure for a haunting tour through the colonial past, retracing the steps of Europeans in Africa from the late eighteenth century onward and using his own experience of the Saharan desert to expose the roots of genocide. In Terra Nullius, Lindqvist traveled 7,000 miles to explore the shocking story of how Australia’s “no man’s land” became the province of the white man. This journey through the lands the British claimed as their own because they were inhabited by “lower races,” the native Aborigines—nearly nine-tenths of whom were annihilated by whites—is one of Lindqvist’s most powerful works.