To be honest, Gourevitch's book doesn't sound inviting. What book about genocide could? And its title alone suggests a kind of vicious, heart-stopping sadness that many of us would prefer to turn away from. Which may, in fact, be the point. Either way, Gourevitch's writing won't let you turn away. He tells the story of the Rwandan genocide in a prose so wonderfully crafted and infused with anger and insight as to be nearly hypnotic. From the opening pages, the young reporter confronts his own ve More...

When I would tell my friends about how great of a book this is, I got a lot of, "I can't read that, it's too upsetting." This came from my progressive, non-profit sector, CSA share-owning friends. And I know what they mean. But seriously, you should read this book anyway.

And not just because it's important to understand the things that have gone on in this world during our time (and before) in order to change the future. Also because Gourevitch discusses some things in this book that I've never More...

NON VI DIMENTICHEREMO
Questa non è solo una storia africana. Non è solo una lotta tra hutu e tutsi. È una storia che riguarda l’umanità intera. Perché non esistono essere umani più umani degli altri.

Nel più piccolo paese dell’Africa, il Rwanda, in un territorio inferiore a quello della Lombardia, in un paesaggio che a volte ricorda le Langhe altre la Svizzera, tra il 6 aprile e la metà di luglio del 1994 si è consumato il genocidio più cruento e rapido della storia dell’umanità: si calcola che in More...

This is not an easy book to read. But Gourevitch takes a tragedy about which most of the world knows very little -- the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 -- and he thoroughly explores it, and along the way he humanizes it. This is a story about genocide, about war and politics, yes, but moreover it's a story about the people who lived through the horror of genocide, and those who died. Gourevitch talks to anyone who will tell him their story, it seems: survivors of the genocide, military offici More...

I read this book while volunteering in Burundi, a country that has experienced a parallel civil conflict to that of Rwanda, but with much less international attention.

The book is full of chilling stories, exposing both the horror of the actions of the Rwanda orchestrators of the genocide, the willing and complicit participants in carrying out the genocide, and the willful inaction and facilitation of the conflict by international actors, including the U.S. government.

Most striking to me was th More...

Here's the review of this book I put on my blog:
On the flight home I read Philip Gourevitch’s ` We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families’. In spite of many accolades for the author, I didn’t like his writing. However, the book is worth reading as a disturbing reminder of the violence and cruelty man is capable of committing in the name of such recently constructed ideas as ethnicity and nationalism. This sort violence is perhaps among the most serious problems faci More...

possibly one of the best books i've read on rwanda. horribly depressing, horribly great, just.

absolutely wonderful work. i put it second to The Age of Genocide only because that is possibly the end all book on genocide, because of it's breath, scope, and wonderful, wonderful history.

but this is maybe the best book on rwanda i've read. and read again. and again.

How do you rate a book that is about something so absolutely horrible. When I was younger I remember reading books on the holocaust and thinking this could never happen again. How naive I was. Not only has it happened again, it continues to happen and the world barely notices. I have read books about the Rwandan genocide from the victim's point of view. Those books give you the horrible gut wrenching emotional side of it. This book helps you understand the political side of it. My only gripe is More...

Informative...

The second part of this book is better than the first. Although interesting, the first part seems detached and meandering; a nice set of interviews - but for the most part they seem to be after-the-fact interviews.

The second part becomes more unified and emotional. It is concerned more with the here and now; of how Rwanda is 'coping' with the genocide (indeed, if it can ever hope to do so). Sometimes I feel the author is painting a 'rosy' picture of Rwandan president Paul Kagame. More...

Although I read this book only recently, over a decade after the events of the genocide in Rwanda I think that time has only reinforced and strengthened the impact of this book. While I cannot claim to have been old enough to be properly plugged into the political landscape during as the events were unfolding, it is indeed damning that I could have come away from all of the news coverage that the genocide eventually produced with such a deeply flawed understanding of the massacre.

“We wish to inf More...

How can you call a book about genocide great? It was informative and powerful. Tragic and very very sad. It made me so angry at times I had to put it down for fear I would throw it across the room. This book had me so frustrated with the politics involved that I just want to scream in frustration.
I have to add some of the most powerful, to me, statements made in this book:
"In May of 1994, I happened to be in Washington to visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, an immensely popular to More...

This is a devastating book. It gives a few family narratives in the context of genocide and hits your soul with the sadness of friends and neighbors and families killed by friends and neighbors and family. The book does a descent job of giving some causalities to the genocide without necessarily falling into justification. It also works with the tensions of justice and reconciliation wondering how the post genocide RPA government can navigate between the lines of justice and stability, between t More...

just to get it out of the way up front, this book blew me away. it is extremely difficult to get through, both because of the gruesomely accurate description of the genocide as well as the length and density of the writing. but i think gourevitch did a great job of painting a "big picture" of the issues that led to such an event and brilliantly told some stories that have left me in awe even to this day.

what i kept seeing come up again and again was the idea that as horrible as this genocide was More...

This is a remarkable book and possibly one of the most difficult I have ever read.

In 1994 over 800,000 people were killed in the systematic genocide of Rawanda, brought about by racial tension, prejudice, ignorance and group-think insanity. It is hard to understand or appreciate how in the space of 100 days so many people could be killed- neighbor against neighbor, family against family- and for it to happen is such a dispassionate fashion. People simply rounded up, or cornered and raped and mur More...

A first hand examination of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Gives a number of survivor stories, a thorough look at the country in it's aftermath (up to 1998). An excellent view of the international communities role in the genocide, it's inaction, and the debacle of humanitarian aid which aggravated the situation and wound up giving money and supplies to many of the Genocidaires. It did not seem to be as explanatory of the causes of the genocide or the organization and planning and execution. These More...

This is a remarkable book about an unspeakable event. If I could tell the President to read one book, this might be it. I've written a long blog post about here: I've written about a book that really shook me up. I can't recommend it more, but it is blunt and devastating. http://douglevin.blogspot.com/2013/02....

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories of Rwanda.
Philip Gourevitch.
Narrated by Jeff Cummings, produced by Blackstone and downloaded from Audible.

This book took the author three years to write. He went to Rwanda in 1995, made at least eight trips to Rwanda in the next few years, finally publishing the book in 1998. The publisher’s note says as much as I could, and much better. I am still reeling from this book and want to find out what happened in Rwand More...

I rate the book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch with a good four out of five stars.

This book is about the accounts of the things that the people went through while the genocide was going on in Rwanda. Most of the book describes really graphic things that went on, and the conflicts between the Hutu and the Tutsis.

The major things that I liked about gourevitch’s book is that it really depicts the things that happened to people in Rwanda More...

"The real question is: What does the international community really want the UN to do [in Rwandda]? The UN simply wasn't given the tools." - Major General Dallaire

"In [Rwandan Patriotic Army General Kagame's] view, determined and well-disciplined fighters, motivated by coherent ideas of political improvement, can always best the soldiers of a corrupt regime that stands for nothing but its own power."

"The West might later wring its hands over the criminal irresponsibility of its policies, but the More...

We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
Philip Gourevitch
353
Non-Fiction

The book is written as a semi-autobiography about the author's trip to Rwanda, but rather than summarize his story I will summarize what the book is actually about: the Rwandan Genocide.

In 1993 there was a massive amount of racial tension between two racial groups in Rwanda, the Tutsis and the Hutus. A recent power shift had left the general media read by Hutus asa result of "Hutu power groups". More...

Philip Gourevitch's harrowing account of the Rwandan massacres, makes one wonder if there will ever be a name that goes down indelibly in the mind as the master architect or agent of this -- even now -- unbelievable crime against humanity.

The real problem with the Rwandan carnage, as Gourevitch, a staff writer for The New Yorker, makes clear, is that it was not restricted to a crime of state. True, the massacres were meticulously planned and ruthlessly executed by the state, but the instrumentat More...

Without the slightest embellishment or over exaggeration I believe this book is deserved of the highest praise of any work of non-fiction. It is easily the most inclusive portrayal of a significant human conflict I have ever read. The particular event in recent history that it examines is the Rwandan genocide. Without simply demonizing the one half of the Rwandan population that massacred the other, Gourevitch asks incredibly hard questions and hears answers from all levels of society from child More...

Holy critter. I started this book knowing the Rwandan genocide was basically composed of Hutus killing Tutsis in the mid-1990s, and ended it with a radically transformed mindset toward so many institutions and people and ideas. Chief among them is the UN and the international community as a whole, who are perhaps the most responsible, I think, for ignoring the genocide and facilitating the massacres that followed it.

The book itself was easy to read, surprisingly, since it dealt with some of the More...

This book was really confusing to understand when i was reading it the first day. there's not a specific protagonist because there are different stories of survivor told by Philip. in Philip Gourevitch's non-fictional amazing best seller, there is an conflict that involves an individual and society. Philip reports countless stories of Rwandan genocide to inform the public and question about humanity. the genocide was between the Tutsi and Hutu. The Rwandan genocide was from April 1994 , in one-h More...

This book is very difficult to read because it's college level, but it is definitely worth it. Philip Gourevitch did an amazing job by sending his message, that not one person left the Rwandan genocide unchanged. This book is very detailed and specific, and it is not a novel. It seemed like a very interesting textbook.Gourevitch was trying open his readers minds and the world's eyes to the reality of the situation at hand. Genocide happens and he wanted to figure out how it affects it's members. More...

I read this book with my heart in my stomach. At the same time I could not put it down. For anyone interested in understanding the history of Rwanda, the genocide that occurred there, the colonialization that pitted the Hutus against the Tutsis and the artificiality of separating these two groups, this is a brilliant and essential book.

I learned about how the Rwandan population was arbitrarily separated into two groups - the Tutsis and the Hutus - by the Belgians. They are actually the same race More...

The best book to read about the genocide in Rwanda. I took a recent trip and to prepare I absorbed as much as I could that was readily available. There is a great documentray called "Shake Hands with the Devil" that I watched about General Dallaire, the Canadian UN Commander. I looked at General Dallaires book by the same name, too big but I understand it is great as well. If you want a good overall account of what happened and why, Gourevitch gives equal parts background information and persona More...

I have always felt an obligation to read books like this - books written about the terrible things human beings do to one another. In 1994, I was safe in my little house taking care of my 3-year-old son. Not worrying that we would be hacked to death by our machete-wielding neighbors. People we'd lived next to for years without incident.

I read these books to try and understand why. I know that it's unlikely I'll ever be satisfied with the answer, but I continue to try. Gourevitch does an admirabl More...

This book details the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-nineties, and I must confess that prior to reading this book, I knew next to nothing about what had been going on in that country while in this country we obsessed about Desert Storm and I passed through junior high, high school, and college. In Rwanda, two ethnic groups that had lived side-by-side for centuries turned against each other, with Hutus declaring that Tutsis were not true Rwandans and needed to be eliminated from the country. In Ap More...

This was an incredibly thorough book dealing with the Rwandan genocide. It was an intensely emotional and difficult book to read. I had to keep puting it down in order to try to digest the incredible injustices that were involved in the lead- up and the aftermath of the genocide that nearly decimated an entire tribe of African peoples. The author does a phenominal job of painting the historical lead-up to the genocide ... then follows the stories of a number of Rwandans as they tell their person More...