Rating: 
Summary: A superb telling of a very sad story
Review: This is just a really good book about something truly horrific. The only thing that keeps me from giving it a perfect five stars is when the author gets a bit wordy (using expressions like "writing a new national narrative").Read it and learn (and maybe cry a bit too)
Rating: 
Summary: An eye opener - The US press did not provide this view!
Review: Gourevitch does a nice job of changing from past to present throughout the book to weave a story that is much different from what the US press provided. At points he seems to take sides in this social divide, but overall he provides what appears to be a clear and even handed accounting of what is in essence the worst of mankind. The writer's style lends itself to quick reading.
Rating:
Summary: A great book about genocide, politics and humanity
Review: Henry Kissinger was once asked why he invested so little time on Latin American diplomacy. His response was a sarcastic echo of Hitler's justification for the annexation of Czech Sudetenland: "South America is a dagger aimed at the heart of Antarctica."
And so it is with Rwanda, relegated to the interior of continent that is a geopolitical second-class citizen. At the same time Americans were building a museum to memorialize the Jewish Holocaust in World War II, our government, along with the U.N. bureaucracy and most of the rest of the world, was washing its hands of the blood in Rwanda.
Here is an exceptional piece of both political reporting and literature that brings light to a dark corner of modern history. If you're thinking about reading this book, I urge you to look at the reviews. Listen to what the readers are saying, the unanimity of feeling. It's so rare to see a review site where not one person trashes a book. And yet this book is so moving and powerful, I think it would take cynicism to the point of inhumanity to deny its impact.
I had read Romeo Dallaire's "Shake Hands with the Devil", which is a harrowing first-person account of the events in Rwanda. Dallaire was the commander of the woefully understaffed U.N. "peacekeeping" force, a force that could do little more than bear witness to the genocide that was unfolding around them. But if you have to read one book about Rwanda, it should be Peter Gourevitch's "We wish to inform you..."
It is not only difficult to put down because of its narrative force, but starting from the personal stories of genocide witnesses he is able to zoom out and see the larger picture in which the rest of the world is complicit. As Gourevitch observes, if what happened in Central Africa happened in Europe, it would have been considered a World War. Why were we so oblivious in the West? Are all men created equal?
To say it's a "must read" book really doesn't do it justice. You're denying yourself something important if you don't read it.
Rating:
Summary: wow
Review: incredible book...will make you question if the world has learned ANYTHING from the genocides/massacres of the past.
Rating:
Summary: WARNING: Not for the faint of heart
Review: PRODUCT ADVISORY--Do not read this book (or this review) if any of the following are true:
You have no stomach for descriptions of graphic violence and human cruelty.
You believe and want to keep believing that serious problems in faraway countries should always be handled by the U.N.
You cherish a belief that people are rational.
If any of those statements applies to you, you'll have serious issues with this book. It's not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach, it forces the reader to come to terms with the ineffectiveness of international institutions, and, most importantly, it shows the full dark potential of man's cruel, brutish, irrational side.
Gourevitch's book is difficult to read but impossible to put down. He writes excellently and knowingly about a difficult topic many people chose to remain ignorant of: the slaughter of 800,000 Rwandans over the space of a few short months in 1994.
Few people outside Rwanda realized what was happening until it was too late, and no one of consequence took any meaningful action to stop the massacres--the U.N. and the U.S., stung by their failure in Somalia less than a year before, sat on the sidelines. Meanwhile, mobs of Hutus, whipped into a frenzy by radio broadcasts spewing anti-Tutsi propaganda, hacked hundreds of thousands of people to death with machetes.
To his great credit, Gourevitch gets beyond statistics, facts and figures, telling stories that bring these events to life in horrifying, vivid detail. Readers feel the terror of Tutsis who had their Achilles tendons cut, who were left writhing in pain on the ground while their assailants ate, drank, and came back to kill them after dinner.
While writing this book, Gourevitch traveled extensively in Rwanda and elsewhere, even as the aftershocks of the massacre reverberated through the surrounding nations. This research paid off well, and he paints an indelible picture of a country and a region wracked by a massive human catastrophe. Indeed, "We Wish to Inform You" reads like a travelogue from hell, a visitor's guide to a blood-soaked patch of God's green earth where the perpetrators of genocide now live side by side with the friends and family of their victims.
Other reviewers have criticized this book for meandering too much after the initial descriptions of the massacres. These passages, though, work well to illustrate how the U.N., having sat on its hands during the killings, bungled their aftermath, and how the problems in Rwanda were ultimately best solved by Rwandans and other Africans. And that is perhaps the best and most surprising thing about Gourevitch's book; after all the bloodshed and all the killing and all the cruelty, it ends on a note of peace, optimism--and humanity.
Rating:
Summary: A powerful and prizewinning book
Review: This book has been very highly praised. Is it really that good? As far as I'm concerned, yes, it is.
That does not mean that those who want to learn something about the genocide in Rwanda ought to read this book and no others! But this book ought to be one of the ones that you do read.
Gourevitch explains that there really was a carefully planned genocide, in which about 800,000 of Rwanda's 900,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in about 100 days, decimating (reducing by 10%) the population of the country as a whole. He shows that many rather ordinary Rwandans carried out these murders, often with machetes. And there are a number of individual stories that make it all horrifyingly real to us readers. Although I often dislike an anecdotal approach to events, I think Gourevitch does a superb job with it.
There are numerous issues that beg to be discussed, and Gourevitch addresses them. He shows how the genocide was planned, he describes how it was accomplished, and he shows the extent of retaliation for it. Throughout, he manages to keep his moral compass. He properly dismisses excuses by the killers that there was nothing they could do, or that they were merely following orders, or merely giving orders. Nor does he try to make the intentional attempt to get rid of all Tutsis equivalent to incidents in a war to conquer or liberate parts of Rwanda.
Some of the issues Gourevitch raises deal with responsibility of other nations. Where was the UN in all of this? Or France? Or the United States? He points out that there is a Genocide Convention whose premise is "that a moral imperative to prevent efforts to exterminate whole peoples should be the overriding interest animating the action of an international community of autonomous states." Germany was indeed conquered in 1945, its leaders were brought to justice, the country was then reconstructed. Does the international community have the same attitude about similar threats today? Obviously not. In fact, France tended to support and arm the Hutu killers. The United Nations never obtained the authority to try to stop any of the atrocities. And the United States helped delay sending more UN forces, so that even had the UN decided to try to take action, it would have been unable to do so at the height of the massacres.
Rwanda is an overwhelmingly Catholic nation, and I wondered about the role of the Church in the genocide. After all, the killers and victims tended to be of the same religion. It was disappointing to discover how little the church leaders did to speak out against the killings, let alone stop them.
Of course, reading about such terrible inhumanity does make one wonder about our species as a whole. Are we humans really this awful? Well, yes, sometimes we are. But this book also left me with a feeling of hope and a sense that we can do much better. I think the book made me realize that if we were to show just a little more respect for truth and human rights and pay just a little more attention to events, we would be likely to avoid tragedies such as this one.
Rating:
Summary: such clarity of reporting is rare indeed
Review: In this book, Gourevitch defines not only what it is to be a Rwandan today but what it means to be a human being. His humility and gut-wrenching honesty called my own moral reasoning into question, and I dream of a world in which every person expressed so much respect for humanity. This could be the most gorgeous journalism I have ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Sobering...
Review: I didn't think my opinion of the United Nations and "International Community" could be much lower. And then I read this book. It is breathtaking, I still cannot get my mind around this. What happened, how the rest of the world reacted and failed to react... The book is a page-turner (as difficult as this can be) and you will not forget what you read here.
Rating:
Summary: A must read
Review: A great piece of work on this little known tragedy. Everyone knows about it, but not the details and how horrifying they are. Not just brutal acts but the events leading up to and after them, the general apathy of the world community, UN, and the hand the French played. This is yet another book that also brings to light the fact the UN and other aid agencies may be doing more harm than good in the name of helping people in Africa by unwittingly helping the wrong regimes and power structures. It has been repeated so often and so much that one wonders why nothing is being done about it. Heart rending read, but a compulsory one.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Powerful
Review:
Read this book and you will long remember the horrific Rwandan genocide. Eight hundred thousand Rwandans hacked to death with machetes within 100 days is difficult to fathom let alone forget. But the apathy reflected by the international community will continue to remind everyone of the difference between a poor black African nation and a European or a rich Arab nation. This was aptly illustrated when author Phillip Gourevitch visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. As the museum staffers walked by with buttons proclaiming "Remember" and "Never Forget" Gourevitch was reading the local newspaper which contained pictures of bloated Rwandan corpses clogging a stream. How easy it seemed for the American psyche to disassociate the two events. Sadly, when you read Major General Dalliare's (in charge of the UN troops there) comments you realize how little it would have taken to prevent the entire tragedy.
This is a must-read book. It is well written and will hit you like a sledgehammer.
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