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About This Book
ISBN13: 9780312243357 |
Awards
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Winner of the George Polk Book Award
Winner of the Guardian First Book Award
Powells.com Staff Pick
I just finished rereading We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families because after reading Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning I thought that the atrocities committed in Rwanda might make more sense to me. There are eerie similarities between a group of middle-aged Nazi inductees and the masses of machete wielding Hutus who committed atrocities in the name of Hutu Power. In a sense both books are simultaneously hopeful and grim. Both prove Hannah Arendt's notion of the banality of evil or my friend Andrew's favorite saying "everyday is your birthday when you're stupid." Not to be flip, but if you think it can't happen here, visit Cumming, Georgia and tell me how many African Americans you see. Ignorance ain't bliss if you're in the minority. John M., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
This remarkable debut book chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. Though the killing was low-tech — largely by machete — it was carried out at shocking speed: some 800,000 people were exterminated in a hundred days. A Tutsi pastor, in a letter to his church president, a Hutu, used the chilling phrase that gives Philip Gourevitch his title.
With keen dramatic intensity, Gourevitch frames the genesis and horror of Rwanda's "genocidal logic" in the anguish of its aftermath: the mass displacements, the temptations of revenge and the quest for justice, the impossibly crowded prisons and refugee camps. Through intimate portraits of Rwandans in all walks of life, he focuses on the psychological and political challenges of survival and on how the new leaders of postcolonial Africa went to war in the Congo when resurgent genocidal forces threatened to overrun central Africa.
Can a country composed largely of perpetrators and victims create a cohesive national society? This moving contribution to the literature of witness tells us much about the struggle everywhere to forge sane, habitable political orders, and about the stubbornness of the human spirit in a world of extremity.
Review:
Gourevitch is particularly adept at systematically debunking the myths, widely circulated in the Western press, that shaped our early perceptions of what was happening in Rwanda: that the conflict was an age-old struggle between two distinct peoples bent on annihilating each other, and that this was merely another example — albeit a somewhat amplified one — of the usual 'African madness." In fact, Gourevitch writes, none of this was true. For starters, Hutus and Tutsis were sufficiently intermingled to the point that ethnographers no longer recognized them as distinct ethnic groups. In Rwanda in 1994, your identity was your politics, and the twists were many and strange; the man who coined "Hutu Power" and became one of its most rabid practitioners was born Tutsi and later acquired Hutu identity papers...." Scott Sutherland, Salon.com
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About the Author
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
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jk123, June 7, 2006 (view all comments by jk123)
This is an important book. For readers who want to get behind the mind-numbing facts and figures of the tragedy in Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch puts a human face on the events. It is clearly written, with a straightforward style that is easy to follow. Be cautioned, though, this is horrifying material.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780312243357
- Subtitle:
- Stories from Rwanda
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Picador USA
- Location:
- New York :
- Subject:
- Africa
- Subject:
- International
- Subject:
- Government (non-U.S.)
- Subject:
- Ethnic relations
- Subject:
- Genocide
- Subject:
- Africa, central
- Subject:
- Rwanda
- Subject:
- Africa - General
- Subject:
- General Political Science
- Subject:
- Government - Comparative
- Subject:
- Violence in Society
- Copyright:
- 1998
- Series:
- Bestselling Backlist
- Publication Date:
- September 1999
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 355
- Dimensions:
- 8.30x5.54x.95 in. .76 lbs.
