The Silence

Rating:
Summary: horrific yet important
Review: Having last week been in Kigali, Rwanda as half a million refugees returned from exile in Zaire, I found this book to be extremely important to help me understand the trauma lying under the surface of these people. The photographs are stark and brutal as was the situation. This is a must read for anybody planning to work in Rwanda

Rating:
Summary: Indictment and Memorial for the horrors of the genocide
Review: The books serves as an indictment against those who committed the atrocities during the Rwanda genocide, against those that stood by(most everyone), and those that stood in the way(the French).

It also serves as a silent memorial for those who died and for all the other innocents caught in the middle and forced into refugee camps.

A highly recommended accompaniment to "I wished to inform you that we will be killed tomorrow".

This books stands with "The House of Bondage" by Cole, an indictment of Apartheid, and "Amin's Bloody Rule", an obvious indictment of Idi Amin, as the best photo documentaries of the hardest of times in Africa. (Amin's Bloody Rule is impossible to find, published in Uganda).

Rating:
Summary: Indictment and Memorial for the horrors of the genocide
Review: The books serves as an indictment against those who committed the atrocities during the Rwanda genocide, against those that stood by(most everyone), and those that stood in the way(the French).

It also serves as a silent memorial for those who died and for all the other innocents caught in the middle and forced into refugee camps.

A highly recommended accompaniment to "I wished to inform you that we will be killed tomorrow".

This books stands with "The House of Bondage" by Cole, an indictment of Apartheid, and "Amin's Bloody Rule", an obvious indictment of Idi Amin, as the best photo documentaries of the hardest of times in Africa. (Amin's Bloody Rule is impossible to find, published in Uganda).

Rating:
Summary: good visual to accompany other research
Review: The images are breathtaking, they leave you unsettled and wondering about the inhumanity of the situation in Rwanda. For people new to the topic, this book is not necessarily for you. The genocide was complicated, and this book, as a collection of images, does not explain the full story. There is no text in this book except for the chronology at the end, which is decent, although selective and somewhat incomplete.

The photographs, while powerful, have no captions, and therefore the guilt and the innocence of the people being photographed is ambiguous. In fact, that is why I give this book four stars rather than five. To look at this book with no real knowledge behind the genocide, all you see is a great deal of human suffering. The reality is that the images at the beginning are of the tutsi massacres by the genocidaires, whereas the images toward the end are of the terrible conditions of the refugee camps where the killers fled to escape the advance of the RPF. What one must know and understand clearly is that those people at the refugee camps were, for the most part, the perpetrators of the genocide. The ambiguity in his images of clearly distinguishing between victims and killers can be misleading.

If you have done research on the genocide and feel compelled to have a visual to accompany the stories, then this book is a worthwhile one to use for that purpose. But otherwise, the sight of so much indiscriminantly photographed human suffering can be really distracting to the cause of determining guilt and innocence. It's important to look through this book with a discerning eye.