Rating: 
Summary: Informative
Review: This is an interesting account of the genocide in Rwanda. Gourevitch interviews people whose lives were adversly impacted by the genocide and people who committed the genocide. I wonder how he was able to feel safe while talking to people who had murdered other people in cold blood. He seems not to have felt that his life was in danger while he was in Rwanda. His book is informative even though it really does not rise above the despair-of-Africa theme and Gourevitch's sometimes erroneous takes on U.S. history
Rating: 
Summary: It's as hard to put down as it is to continue reading.
Review: It's a good thing Philip Gourevitch is a master with words or it would be all the harder to keep reading about this topic.His book, though, is a great example of literary journalism. Gourevitch does a fantastic job with getting out of the way and letting the events and people involved in them tell their own stories. As he does this, he elegantly weaves in the long, creepy history that led up to the slaughter of Tutsis in Rwanda and shows just how these things come about. His book, I love the title, but I'm not going to retype it a bunch of times, provides a great service. It shows how insideous, how complete a genocidal plan is and how it comes to be. He also introduces us, close and personal, to people who lived and died during it.Gourevitch doesn't treat his subject as gross spectacle or as the tourist/reporter like so many foreign coorespondents come off when trying to wax eloquent. The book also is not full of a bunch of space-filler facts that clutter many similar pieces of book-length journalism. ..... As a wire editor for a newspaper, going through the daily international que full of pithy, disjointed death toll stories and on-the-fly analysis, it's heartening to read about these events in such a fluid, well-constructed manner.Gourevitch provides his reader with a clear window into how events transpire and how they spur other events.
Rating:
Summary: Possibly the most powerful book I have ever read.
Review: I began reading this book thinking, "By the end of this book, I should understand why this genocide happened." No such luck. The author does not let anyone off the hook, and that includes the reader. I absolutely, highly recommend this book. It will move you.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful Writing About An Incomprehensible Tragedy
Review: Mr. Gourevitch is a superb writer and does a wonderful job leading the reader through the awful tragedy that was Rwanda. It is a book of enormous power.
Rating:
Summary: Trying to explain the inexplicable
Review: I read this book as a mental health professional, trying to understand how ordinary people can be turned into killing machines. Philip Gourevitch writes an excellent, deeply researched and deeply felt book explaining WHAT happened in Rwanda in 1994, and HOW it happened; but I found myself trying to learn more about the WHY. What makes people shed their humanity with no more apparent difficulty than a snake shedding its skin? What are we to make of a Hutu priest who tells his Tutsi parishioners, just before he lets the Hutu militia invade his church where they were hiding and slaughtered all they could find, "God no longer wants you"? Or another Hutu priest who refers to his Tutsi mother, to her face, as a "cockroach"? Gourevitch has been castigated in some reviews for raising questions and not providing answers. Perhaps to some questions, there aren't any answers. We are left with a sinking feeling after reading this absorbing, well-written book, and a sickening realization that it could -- and probably will -- happen again... and again... and again.
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Summary: How dangerous we humans are.
Review: A powerful, horrifying book of how we humans are always creating excuses to destroy fellow human beings. One of the biggest manslaughter of the last years. Place in an African country, Rwanda, that divided its population in a racial, religiuos madness. Far from a simple news report o a fact report, these book goes down the roots of an old, hideous and classic tale of superiority among races. Highly recomendable, but no for those who are easily impressed. What makes this book worthy is that it escapes the common place of blood and yellowish pages to become a dark essay on human hopeless nature and how in our inner self irrationality overpower any reason and logic thinking structure.
Rating:
Summary: Important
Review: I didn't pay too much attention to the Rwandan massacres when they occurred, because, like most people, I thought that it was just, as Gourevitch, puts it, 'bad guy versus bad guy'. Another case of two groups kiling each other for no good reason. Reading this book shows me just how wrong I was, and how misleading the media of the time was. What we are shown here is a clear case of genocide, and some of the things that were done by one human being to another are so staggeringly awful, it makes you sit back and readjust your opinion on what we humans are capable of. The standout feature of this book is the way that Gourevitch doesn't just present tragedy like we are onlookers at a motor accident. He is trying to discover how normal people can do things like this. Because, after all, this wasn't an act by a small group of insane people. This was thousands of ordinary people butchering their neighbours. It was not a moment of insanity, but a slow and deliberate plan. What can drive so many people to do such things, for days on end? By providing a wealth of background, Gourevitch helps us to understand, not fully, but at least better than when we started, how this tragedy occurred. This is an important book, which deserves to be widely read, because it shows just how much we have left to learn if we ever wish to become a peaceful society. Some people like to say that we humans were barbaric in the past, but we are becoming much more civilised now. Events like this show just how wrong that point of view is.
Rating:
Summary: I HAVE to give this book 5 stars
Review: because my own book is currently getting the same average Amazon rating as Philip Gourevitch's, and I KNOW that his is better than mine (and many, many of the other titles that are getting 4 1/2 stars right now). In fact, it blows the rest of us out of the water so either devalue all the other books or give We Wish to Inform You five stars. Every single one of us has a moral imperative to read this book.
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Summary: the limits of human understanding
Review: Like some reviewers, I too was troubled at first by the way in which this account of the Rwanda genocide is narrated, filtered through the emotions and perceptions of the author. Yet this may be the only way to narrate such horrific events, because they overwhelm human understanding and leave the witness with only their own powerful impressions of the events. The author does his best to make sense of the genocide, but I appreciate how his way of describing this horrific chapter in human history recognizes the impossibility of "objective" understanding of such brutality. A very troubling book, but an important one nonetheless.
Rating:
Summary: More Rwandans, less Gourevitch, s'il vous plait
Review: Where to start? This IS an important book, and virtuallyeveryone would benefit from reading it. Gourevitch is horrified,saddened, and angry; he unabashedly takes sides, excoriating Hutu Power, the U.N. and humanitarian agencies with equal vigor. Unexpectedly (for me, at least), what is more shocking about the book isnot the premediated mass murder of a race of people, but the international community's wholly inadequate, misguided and hypocritical response to the genocide. Having said that, I must say that Gourevitch's writing leaves a lot to be desired. Rather than letting the story tell itself, Philip Gourevitch pauses frequently to ponder Life, Humanity, War, Philip Gourevitch--all the while quoting liberally from European texts as if to prove how well read he is. This might work if Gourevitch were as insightful and original a philosopher as he thinks he is. As it stands, though, his garbled musings (the genocide as a "postmodern war"? Puhleeze!) underscore the vast gulf between Gourevitch as the ultimate outsider/observer--with a safe home in a safe country to return to--and his anguished and displaced subjects. Still, the book's definitely worth reading.
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