We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda

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Summary: EVERYONE should read this book
Review: This is the best book of 1998 - by far. Gourevitch makes you realize that even if you think you are informed about what happened in Rwanda, most of what you know from the papers is just plain wrong.

Not only is the book thoughtful and provocative, Gourevitch has also talked to a broad spectrum of Rwandans - and their individual stories will move and haunt you.

Anyone who purports to have opinions about world politics, human rights, Africa, the Holocaust or morality should read this book.

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Summary: An eye-opener.
Review: I was a peace corps volunteer in Rwanda in 1990 but I was as clueless as any average American as to what was really happening in the genocide. I got it all wrong, thanks to inaccurate and biased reporting from every news source. Mr. Gourevitch finally gives us the facts. His straight shooting style shames the western world into realizing what a grave error we committed by looking the other way. To say this is a good read would trivialize the subject, but it is. I recommend it highly.

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Summary: hard reading
Review: The book presents a grim summary of the events in Rwanda, and the author works well with the recollections of others during the war. Where this book offers a truely original and even more disturbing analysis is in the subsequent international efforts to bring some resolution to the situation. I believe it is the author's view that there can be no peace in Rwanda without justice, yet it is not clear that any kid of justice is possible given all the conflicting interests of the international community at work. This is a smart but depressing book about the inner workings of a war zone in central Africa that will be growing in importance and brutality in the next century.

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Summary: The Most Important Book Published This Year
Review: This book is astonishing in several respects that it would take too long to go into. Two will suffice. First, it is the best reportage published in this annus miribalus of reporting (the LOA set of writing from Viet Nam, Roger Cohen's chilling book on Bosnia and David Remnick's superb look at Ali come to mind). Second, it is a cautionary tale without current parallel. It has been said that it is easier to report evil than to do good. That may be true, but this courageous book tests the rule. One hopes it will lead to action.

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Summary: A shameful chapter of the modern era is brought to light.
Review: Gourevitch immediately establishes himself as the voice of honesty and reason in this messy Hutu/Tutsi affair that continues to this day. Recent slaughters in Bujumbura, Burundi, only serve to remind us how shameful the West behaved when such massacres took place. From Mitterand in France to Clinton in the U.S., and even to Kofi Annan in the U.N. this book forces us to ask the hard questions, to demand the difficult answers. Nothing is easy here. However, having spent time in Burundi and briefly in Rwanda, I can safely say that Gourevitch gets it right time and again. One comes away from the book shaken, reminded that racism exists beyond borders, that countries use other citizens as pawns, that journalists often decide what decimation of race is worthy of being accurately and thoroughly reported. To not read this book is to allow the machetes to be rinsed off, polished, and put back into service.

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Summary: Now I Know
Review: Book reviewers are always writing, "This book should be required reading for anyone who THIS" or "...for anyone who THAT." Humbug. This book should be required reading for anyone who gives a damn about his fellow man and woman. I admit ignorance to the situation in Rwanda before, which is pitiful for anyone who has ever heard the term Holocaust or is conscious of the genocides in Bosnia, Cambodia and elsewhere. But I picked this book up because the title grabbed me by the lapels and forced me to buy it. I'm glad for that. I now feel not only enlightened, but passionate about the plight of Tutsis in Rwanda. Gourevitch is a hero for bringing this issue to the American literary fore, and he is a very talented writer, to boot.

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Summary: Elle Magazine
Review: This thoughtful, beautifully written, and important account is immensely disturbing to read. And yet we want to pass it along to our friends, and to insist that they read it because the information it contains seems so profoundly essential. We need to know what this book has to tell us, for the sake of our own humanity and out of respect for the dead who were slaughtered while we, on the other side of the world, had only the vaguest notion of who exactly the victims were--and of why so many were dying.

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Summary: The Chicago Tribune, Jill Laurie Goodman
Review: Death is big news. So are disaster and destruction. The ravaged faces of survivors stare out at us from our morning papers, bewildered, numb or shattered by grief, strangely exotic. Acts of nature and atrocities of human design seem barely distinguishable in this omnipresent, media-sponsored parade. We hardly have a chance to locate the spot on the globe before our attention is directed to yet another place with an unpronounceable name.

Journalist Philip Gourevitch, in his rich, urgent and outraged reporting about Rwanda, steps boldly outside mainstream journalism's response to horrors in distant places. Content with nothing less than mastery of the complicated, continuing story of the killings in central Africa, Gourevitch has given us "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda."

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Summary: A Very Detailed Account of an Almost Incomprehensible Event
Review: This book does an excellent job of detailing the events and aftermath of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The author connects facts and events with human emotions and motivations. His research on the topic is excellent, his writing clear and the people he interviews memorable. He makes an effort to provide a very balanced approach, but leaves you with the impression that everyone--Hutus, Tutsis, RPA, African governments, Europe, the US, and the UN were all at fault here. His analysis left me wondering if the world has really learned anything from this experience and if anyone would have the will to act differently the "next time."

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Summary: REVIEWS
Review: "A staggeringly good book... a book that should be on bookshelves forever... Gourevitch's beautiful writing drives you deep into Rwanda, his brilliant reportage tells you eveything that can be seen from an event beyond imagining or explaining... He drives you, in fact, right up against the limits of what a book can do." -- Tom Engelhardt in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Oct. 4, 1998

"A milestone of foreign reporting and a chronicle of evil rarely rivaled since Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness." -- Jonathan Randal in the Washington Post Bookworld, Oct. 4, 1998

"Gourevitch's book ranks among the best examples of the journalism of moral witness." -- Lance Morrow in Time, October 12,1998

"A new history of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which Hutus massacred Tutsi civilians is reopening debate over why Washington blocked steps that might have curbed the bloodletting... Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You..." -- Tom Masland in Newsweek, October 5, 1998