Rating: 
Summary: Don't pass over this book
Review: As horribly gripping as the personal accounts were to read, Gourevitch's humanistic perspective and writing style was staggering. He is an unforgettable writer telling one of the unforgettable stories of our lifetime.
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Summary: Wonderful and in depth personal perspective
Review: The author ties in susinctly the historical background of the genocide and his own personal experince in Rwanda to give the reader a moving story of what happened in 1994. The narrative is very readable and the storires of the people who went trhrough this nightmare left me deeply moved.
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Summary: Thought provoking, and a good read too
Review: An extremely thought provoking book. During three to four months in 1994 (roughly April through June), somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans were murdered. This was not random killing, or a declared war. Rather, it was systematic genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutu. Since there were only slightly more that 1,000,000, Tutsi's living in Rawanda when this started, Gourevitch makes a convincing argument that this massacre was far more devastating than was the only comparable event in history, the German attempt to exterminate all Jews during WWII.Several things make these events even more extraordinary (and disturbing). Tutsi's and Hutu's are essentially the same ethnically. The differences are largely class distinctions, imposed by the Europeans who colonized the area, and created a myth that those in the native population who looked more "European" were from a superior racial group. They were then given greater access to education, government jobs, etc. After a couple of generations, the so called Tutsi's became the superior class, because of the favoritism of the powers that be. Nonetheless, Hutu's and Tutsi's continued to intermarry, live together, etc. This leads to the second point, which is that the genocide was largely committed by friends and relatives of the victims. The third, and closely related, point is that this was not a case of high tech, anonymous slaughter. There were no gas chambers, or high altitude bombings here which served to "insulate" the murderers from their victims. Instead, they literally hacked their neighbors to death with machetes. The final thing is that, after the genocide ended, the Tutsi's returned to power. The second half of the book explores the efforts of the new government to strike a balance between justice, the desire for revenge, and the need to move the country toward normalcy. As the author points out, virtually no one in the country was untouched. A very large percentage of the populace was directly involved in the genocide (each victim was often killed by a mob, so there may well have been more killers than victims). Everyone had a close relative who was either murdered or a murderer. This is the first time in history that the murderers and victims have made any attempt to recreate a county in which they have to live and work side by side. The final point is that the international community completely ignored this entire episode, and in fact immediately complained that the victims were "harping" on the genocide instead of "moving on." All of the aid was focused on the surviving murderers, who fled Rawanda to avoid justice, and virtually none (for at least the first 2 years) was given to the survivors. The questions posed, but not really answered, are what makes a person act this way? This question, of course, applies not only to Rawanda, but also to Germany (Hitler's Willing Executioners is an excellent companion to this book). Even more fundamentally, the question applies to slavery, and the subsequent history of race relationships in this country. Only by believing that slaves were somehow not "really" human could the slaveholders justify their own actions, to themselves and to the world. On a broader scale, the question also applies to war in general. Recall how US soldiers were notorious in dehumanizing the Vietnamese--gooks, etc., as a way of allowing them to kill at will. A powerful and thought provoking book.
Rating: 
Summary: Sad, beautifully written account of Int'l inaction
Review: Mr. Gourevitch has written an important book, one that shows what a bunch of complete idiots the Western democracies (US, then France, at the top of the list) are. Especially in the recent aftermath of the Gulf War where we jumped in because of oil, it is doubly depressing to see that our country did basically nothing. Enough of the politics; he is a very fine writer & I encourage anyone who has an interest in humanity to read it.
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Summary: Too Powerful to Read- Too Powerful Not to
Review: Rarely has a book impacted me as much as this one did. I had followed the slaughter in Rwanda nightly in 1994. I was amazed that will all the talk of America as the last great superpower we never even seemed concerned that maybe a million people were being wiped from the face of the earth. Gourevitch's books reminds me that every human being, regardless of race, color, and religion was impacted by the genocide going on in Rwanda. Human life was cheapened severely, but this book also shows that there is hope- hope for reconcilliation and hope that those being slaughtered can overcome evil with out becoming evil. Ever American should read this book- no matter how much it hurts.
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Summary: Opened my eyes, destroyed my beliefs!
Review: I'm a 17 year old high school student, currently in the 12th grade. This book, along with the enormous resources of the Internet, have completely changed the way I look at many things. I loved this book, but at the same time.. I hated it. The horrible stories of Rwanda put many things in perspective for me.. and have made me ask many questions of my family, my friends, my government, my world, and myself. How can I trust a government that would sink so low? A government that would, according to this book and interviews of government officials, turn its back on the fate of millions.. making sure to never acknowledge a "genocide" was occuring, which would force the US to intervene due to the Genocide Convention of 1948. What can I do? What can anyone do? For all the people, all the organizations (like the Red Cross and Amnesty International), and all the journalists that were there.. that knew what was going on.. what could they do? They reported it. They hoped someone would stop it, they hoped the world would act and show that it was up to the challenge. And when the international community got its chance to prove itself just and strong.. it failed. PBS's Frontline interviews with US government officials shocked me, pushing Gourevitch's message farther into my conscience. SEVERAL people within the White House administration, the Pentagon, and the State Department felt what was going on was wrong. Still, nothing happened. Arghh.... But as long as people like General Dallaire and Major General Kagame are around, there will always be hope. As for myself, maybe the Rwanda Patriotic Front has room for 1 more. So, maybe you can see why I both love and hate the book, now. I love it for opening my eyes to the truth. I hate it for destroying much of what I believed to be true..
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Summary: Disturbing,yet hopeful look at an evil tragedy.
Review: Tragedy,horror,devastation,slaughter,genocide;those are the words that spring to mind to describe this book. Yet in this age of sensationalism they have lost much of their power and sound trite when applied to the murder of 800,000 people in a matter of weeks. Such language can't possibly do that justice. It requires your imagination to soak in this bloody hell for it to have any meaning at all. So why bother when it is so much easier to turn away? Whether we like it or not such self-protective isolationalism is no longer possible, either politically of socially. Technology has greatly expanded our macrocosm. The invisible bonds connecting earth to satellite have tethered our consciousness and our conscience to every corner of the globe. But our psyches are not equipped for this barrage, it only serves to anaesthesize. The gift of this book is that it provides context and a framework for comprehending evil as a structured,organized force and, more importantly, as an avoidable series of events. The book also manages to individualize the suffering and loss bringing feeling where it was once numb,replacing apathy with empathy. It is at once searing indictment of man's savagery and an inspiring tale of survival and perservence. Perhaps the best reason for reading this book is that you might remember how fortunate you are; that the traffic,the bills,job stress,the crying child,the rude customer,being on hold,the price of gas,and the internet waiting are all the petty annoyances of an otherwise lucky people.
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Summary: Gourevitch props our eyes open to the decimation of Rwanda.
Review: WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES Stories from Rwanda Philip Gourevitch Farrar Straus, Giroux $25.00 356 pp. In 1994, the Hutu majority in Rwanda committed genocide upon their minority countrymen, the Tutsi. 800,000 people were killed in 100 days, three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. In April, while British husbands rushed off with umbrellas to their jobs, Hutu husbands picked up machetes and killed their Tutsi wives. In Germany during May, dancers gyrated to ubiquitous techno-rock, while the leading pop singer in Rwanda urged his Hutu countrymen over the state-sponsored radio to "Kill the cockroaches-"the Tutsis. As the Kiwanis met in Des Moines in June, neighborhood "work groups" of Hutu men and women gathered to go over "hit lists" prepared by the government. During the time it took you to read the above, at least five Tutsis were killed, day by day, week by week, through July. And not a single foreign government or international agency intervened. Why bother? After all, isn't this an "age-old animosity between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups," as the NEW YORK TIMES stated. Haven't they been committing atrocities against each other for centuries? Aren't those poor refugees in the news from Zaire as much victims as the victims in Rwanda? No, no, and emphatically no, replies Philip Gourevitch in this book, selected by the NEW YORK TIMES as one of the year's ten best books of 1998. Until the Belgians issued identity cards during their colonial rule, no formal delineation between the two tribes was common, let alone violent. The "superior" Tutsi myth was simply a repetition of the incredibly specious Hamitic myth, that claimed the Tutsi were "nobler," "aristocratic" primarily because they had more refined, i.e., Caucasian-like features. No massacre had ever occurred prior to one incident in 1959. Those "refugees?" If they were in a camp outside Rwanda, they were one of the 2 million Hutu that fled . when the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front re-took the country. In other words, they could easily have been killers, not victims. One by one, Gourevitch demolishes those conventional myths with which the rest of the world deflected their responsibility. But he does more than that. Like Leontius in Plato's REPUBLIC who, upon seeing a pile of bodies, ran to them opening his eyes wide with his fingers, crying "There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle," Gourevitch rushes to unimaginable places. Once there, filled with both desire to see and disgust at the sight, Gourevitch puts down prose which props our eyes wide open to the horror of Rwanda, past and present. In a bar one evening, he meets an aid worker who speaks of stepping on the dead to help the living. Later in his travels, but earlier in the book, Gourevitch visits the scene of a massacre, a church now kept as a shrine. A member of his group steps on a skull, offending the author-"Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too." The dead cannot be denied their presence anywhere in Rwandan life, then or now. Time and again Gourevitch's narrative resonates with such revelations. The author also pursues both perpetrator and persecuted to question them. He travels all the way to Texas to interview the Hutu minister who received the note from which the title was taken. There, in "an expensive-looking new community," he finds the man, indicted by the FBI for presiding over the slaughter of hundreds in his congregation. He denied everything, in terms eerily echoing claims from the Holocaust: "I never saw anything...I never went anywhere. I stayed at my office." Another man, the "Minister of Justice of Rwanda in exile" claims only Tutsis who sympathized with the RPF forces were killed. Did that include "the fetuses ripped from the wombs of Tutsis, after radio announcers had reminded listeners to take special care to disembowel pregnant victims?" asks Gourevitch. "Think about it," replies the minister. Let's say the Germans attack France, so France defends itself against Germany. They understand that all Germans are the enemy. The Germans kill women and children, so you do, too-"an answer that makes genocide the fault of the victims as well as the perpetrators. Once again, Gourevitch pops our eyes wide open. Gourevitch's extensive interviews lead him straight through the tragedy of the past to the dilemma of the present. In the highlands of central Rwanda, he finds a woman who tells him "A certain Girumuhatse is back, a man who beat me during the war...This man threw me in a ditch after killing off my whole family. He's now at his house again...he asked my pardon." When Gourevitch confronts this admitted killer, the man denies responsibility, and blames his superiors: "The authorities understand that many just followed orders." That reply not only puts the lie to the "Never Again" buttons Gourevitch sees U.S. Holocaust Museum employees wearing, it puts a unique perspective on life in Rwanda: "Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people...been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered...as one cohesive national society." That mandate for coexistence has been enforced almost single-handedly by one of the most powerful men in Africa, Vice President Kagame. It was he who defeated the Hutu Majority forces, kept his forces from major retaliation, repatriated 600,00 Rwandans from Goma in four days, and ousted President Mobutu from then-Zaire. In a remarkable series of interviews with this remarkable man, Gourevitch throws light on the events listed above, the developing recovery, and the fleeting hope for Rwanda because this one man claims that "people can be made bad, and they can be taught to be good." Gourevitch found little hope of that, and less reason in the almost-four years he spent forcing himself to look at the Rwandan catastrophe. Although he finds reason to blame France for supporting the Hutus, America for refusing to intervene, and international relief agencies for prolonging warfare by literally feeding the Hutu genocidaires, he fails to exhume the one compelling reason we all desire-why?. Solidarity with neighbors, a government trying to preserve itself, acquiescence by the slaughtered-none of these reasons, alone or together, answer that unfathomable question. Fortunately, his vivid portrait of the Rwandan plight articulates for us that question in ways we dare not ignore, just as Leontius could not ignore that pile of bodies. We do so only at the risk of reducing genocide to the level of a cheese sandwich, like the American officer said in a Rwandan bar: "What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich? Genocide, genocide, genocide. Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich. Who gives a s---? Crimes against humanity. Where's humanity? Who's humanity? You? Me?...Hey, just a million Rwandans..." 800,000 actually, in 100 days, in 1994. But who's counting?
Rating:
Summary: A thorough, dispassionate tour of Hell
Review: Edmund Burke said that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." This book drives home the real world truth of this aphorism. It presents a detailed but never boring overview of the history of Rwanda leading up to the massacre of nearly a million people in three months time as the whole world knowingly stood by in silence. Worse, Gourevitch is convincing that some nations were actively complicit in the events he describes. To his credit, Gourevitch largely avoids graphic descriptions of specific murders, preferring simple declarative statements that this person or that was later killed, or that person's corpse was later found, etc. The technique leaves the terror of the doomed to the reader's imagination and does so most effectively. But two aspects of the book stand out most to me. First, it shows how a genocide actually happens and progresses from political rhetoric to reality. Second, it is a stern demand for answers as to why the genocide was allowed to happen in the first place. Most of us probably relate to the Holocaust as a distant, historical event driven by Hitler's singular evil. Most of us probably believe that "it could never happen again." It can. It did. And unless we learn from this wonderful, important book, it will again. Thank you, Philip Gourevitch, for your years of effort (at what must have been a great personal cost) to bring this story to the world's attention.
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Summary: Compelling, but embarrassing.
Review: Compelling reading, but very embarrasing for those of us in the "civilized" world whose governments ignored, and in some cases (The French for instance) promoted, the massacre of millions of innocents. I read this in one sitting.
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