"Exterminate All the Brutes" is a unique study of Europe's dark history in Africa, written in the form of a travel diary and a historical examination of European racism over the past two centuries. Like Edward Said's Orientalism, Lindqvist's book examines the history of European racism, setting Conrad's Heart of Darkness in context and tracing the legacy of the writings of European explorers and theologians, politicians and historians, from the late eighteenth century on, in an effort to help us understand that most terrifying of Conrad's lines, "Exterminate all the brutes." Lindqvist argues that the harrowing racism that led to the Holocaust in the twentieth century had its roots in European colonial policy of the preceding century. This is an argument that was made in Hannah Arendt's celebrated Origins of Totalitarianism, but Lindqvist approaches it differently, with the insights of an artist and biographer.

"Exterminate All the Brutes" raises questions uniquely appropriate to the current American debate on the depth and costs of racism today.