And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

The first World War in so many ways shaped the 20th century and really remade our world for the worse.

It sure is a rising tide, and we have a particularly nasty exemplar of it in the U.S., in Donald Trump.

Even [Ernst] Hemingway, perhaps the most intentionally non-political of American writers, became passionately partisan during the Spanish Civil War.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

The late Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, for example, had a wonderful ability to get her country's injustices and contradictions down on paper. Ditto for her countryman the great playwright Athol Fugard.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.