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

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

4.34 of 5 stars 4.34 · rating details · 10,073 ratings · 898 reviews

In April of 1994, the government of Rwanda called on everyone in the Hutu majority to kill everyone in the Tutsi minority. Over the next three months, 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler's war against the Jews. Philip Gourevitch's haunting work is an anatomy of the killings in Rwanda, a vivid history of the genocide's backgrou...more

Paperback, 356 pages

Published September 4th 1999 by Picador (first published September 30th 1998)

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Oct 20, 2008 Brendan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Bill Clinton & Maddy Albright

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 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 very mixed emotions as he tours a schoolhouse where decomposed cadavers, piled two and three high, carpet the floors of several rooms.

"I had never been among the dead before," he writes. "What to do? Look? Yes. I wanted to see them, I suppose; I had come to see them . . . Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent, death-fertilized flowers blooming over the corpses it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it.”

This is precisely what Gourevitch so brilliantly accomplishes in We Wish to Inform You: allowing us to imagine, with uncomfortable immediacy, such unimaginable inhumanity. It took 100 days in 1994 for ruling Hutus to slaughter 800,000 of their Tutsi countrymen. But such a statistic only cracks open the door to a world where the victims were killed not by gas or ovens but with swinging machetes; where preachers presided over the killing of their parishes, husbands over the killing of their wives; where the French army intervened in favor of the killers and the U.S. government didn't intervene at all; and where the United Nations peacekeepers, before abandoning the country altogether, fired their weapons only to stop dogs from eating the corpses. Apparently, international concern was focused more on disease than genocide.

Through a myriad of interviews -- with unflagging energy he talks to survivors, killers, politicians and generals -- Gourevitch helps bring a dose of understanding and even, improbably, hope to the madness. He is at his most interesting, though, when speculating on the fate of Rwandan society. In a remarkable bit of analysis, he suggests that the very fact of Rwandan culture that helped usher in the killing -- Rwandans' tendency to do as they are told -- may, in fact, help restore calm. How else can the government integrate so many killers back into society except to order that it be so?(less)

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Nov 04, 2012 Melissa rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

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 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 read discussion of anywhere else.

For instance, he writes about Rwanda's then-Vice President and now President Kagame: "Because he was not an ideologue, Kagame was often called a pragmatist. But that suggests an indifference to principle and... he sought to make a principle of being being rational." And, oh man, really, you have to read the rest of that paragraph, it's on page 225. He says: "against those who preferred violence to reason, Kagame was ready to fight." And he doesn't mean violent fighting, he means engaging in taking principled stands against those who wish to get people wrapped up in insanity instead of engaging with others in a reality-based and clear-headed way. I mean, golly. For some reason, reading that makes my heart race with excitement.

There's another part, too, that makes me pretty much freak out, and it's on page 259 when talking about how the people guilty of genocide tried (and mostly succeeded) in reshaping the conversation about the genocide to hide their guilt. He says, "With the lines so drawn, the war about the genocide was truly a postmodern war: a battle between those who believed that because the realities we inhabit are constructs of our imaginations, they are all equally true or false, valid or invalid, just or unjust, and those who believed that constructs of reality can -- in fact, must -- be judged as right or wrong, good or bad." I practically jumped out of my seat when I read this because I have this pet, uhhh, hobby of raging against people who believe we all construct our own realities and that there is no such thing as objective truth. Gourevitch shows us, in this book, how denying objective reality can be a matter of life or death or, at the very least, justice or injustice.

I have more to say about the book, like how I learned from it that that crazy person who crazy people on street corners across America give out weird political tracts about, Lyndon LaRouche, spread information that the Tutsis committed genocide against the Hutus, not the other way around, and they did it with help from British royalty or some such thing. Ahhh, you know, I always assumed that LaRouche guy was insane because his followers tend to have those crazy eyes, but thanks, this confirms it. And I have more to talk about than that. Lots more. Hey, you should read the book, and then we can talk about it, ok? Whattayasay?(less)

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Dec 06, 2012 Orsodimondo rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: americana, genocidio-e-dintorni, storia, saggistica, memoir, rwanda

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

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Jun 24, 2008 Heidi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: history, social-issues, nonfiction, africa, politics

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

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Sep 21, 2007 Chrisiant rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction, political, africa, memoir

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

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Oct 10, 2007 Tenzing rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 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 facing our world. The self-interested and shameful inaction of the leading powers of the world to stop the genocide in Rwanda, and the counter-productive efforts of international aid organizations in the aftermath, are also worth reading about. I know nations are powerful arbiters of world affairs and it may be foolish to think much of significance can be done without governments backing them, however I wonder if large agglomerations of bureaucrats accountable primarily to powerful vested interests such as rich business lobbies, can ever really be relied upon to genuinely respond to the threats that oppress the lives of those living in poorer parts of our world.

Some of Clinton’s words to survivors of the Genocide captured my reservations about resorting to violence as a force for change - “…because each bloodletting hastens the next as the value of human life is degraded and violence becomes tolerated, the unimaginable becomes more conceivable.” For all of Clinton’s big words, we should keep in mind it was his administration that undertook considerable verbal acrobatics, insisting `episodes of genocide’ and not `genocide’ were taking place in Rwanda. Under UN conventions, acknowledging the latter would have obliged the United States to act.

Going back to Clinton's words, I feel strongly that violating fundamental human rights and lowering standards of human behavior can never be an isolated incident. I mean that such negative actions will resonate and harm many more than the unfortunate direct recipients. The United States' trade and resulting economic power now allows one unsavory authoritarian regime to prop up numerous other governments that think nothing of the dignity of every human being (Sudan and Burma are easy examples. I'm thinking of the refusal by big C to support U.N. sanctions on Burma for its murder of unknown numbers of Buddhist monks protesting the regime.)(less)

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Jul 06, 2007 stephanie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: genocides, good-more-than-once, would-rec, non-fiction, absolutely-must-read

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.

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Feb 05, 2009 Rikelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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Feb 14, 2013 Mikey B. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: africa-asia, anthropology, commentary, history, recent-history

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

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Aug 07, 2008 Danny rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 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 inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” follows the events of the Hutu-led genocide of around 1 million Tutsis beginning in 1994. Though, of course the history of this unprecedented violence trails decades back to the Hutu takeover of the Tutsi-dominated government and countless other small scale slayings of Tutsis beginning in the 1940s. Which itself has roots far back into the settling of the area of Rwanda and grouping of these separate people under a common border by British colonialists. The book provides a startling look at how seemingly minor differences in ethnic origins and social class of two groups of people can be magnified and manipulated for the justification of horrifyingly inhumane actions – all which occur long after time has erased most outward differences.

Gourevitch leads us through the main events that occurred leading up to and then following the governmental program that was designed and executed deliberately to erase the Tutsis from within Rwanda’s borders. This includes a number of stories about the acts of cruelty and (a fewer number) of human kindnesses in a time of “complete chaos”. As you may have guessed, the title of the book is taken from an actual letter that was sent from captured Tutsis to their local pastor begging for assistance – a letter that went largely ignored. It also leads the reader to the refugee camps that were dominated by the Hutu political escapees, attempting to flee from justice. Then describing how the international support largely went to these refugee camps, and how these funds and resources were largely capitalized by the Hutu majority to continue to send out raiding parties to annihilate any surviving Tutsis.

This raises one of the main points of the book. The surprising indifference of the international community during the early stages of the genocide and how the UN and leading countries (the US and France amongst the worst offenders) attempted to avoid any responsibility for helping the Rwandan people. Then, when belated foreign aid was sent, how poorly it was managed and how the funds were often funneled to fuel the killings.

“We wish to inform you” is a book that I would recommend to pretty much anyone with any sense of introspection or feeling of duty to an increasingly interconnected world. The reading is surely not pleasant, but it is certainly shocking and a wake-up call – demanding a re-evaluation of humanity as a whole and one’s place in it.
(less)

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Aug 24, 2008 Jennie rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 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 tourist attraction adjacent to the National Mall. Waiting amid the crowd, I tried to read a local newspaper. But I couldn't get past a photograph on the front page: bodies swirling in water, dead bodies, bloated and colorless, bodies so numerous that they jammed against each other and clogged the stream. The caption explained that these were the corpses of genocide victims in Rwanda. Looking up from the paper, I saw a group of museum staffers arriving for work. On their maroon blazers, several war the label buttons that sold for a dollar each in the museum shop, inscribed with the slogans "Remember" and "Never Again." The museum was just a year old; at its inaugural ceremony, President Clinton had described it as "an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead." Apparently, all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could now die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated, but at the time, his meaning seemed to carry a bolder promise."

"The West's post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good."

"According to its mandate, the UNHCR provides assitance exclusively to refugees - people who have fled across an international border and can demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their homeland - and fugitives fleeing criminal prosecution are explicitly disqualified from protection. The mandate also requires that those who receive UNHCR's assitance must be able to prove that they are properly entitled to refugee status. But no attempt was ever made to screen the Rwandans in the camps; it was considered far too dangerous. In other words, we - all of us who piad taxes in countries that paid the UNHCR - were feeding people who were expected to try to hur us (or our agents) if we questioned their right to our charity." It was well established that the Hutus were the refugees, many of which were those who were directly involved in the genocide of the Tutsis. And they were protected by the UNHCR.

"The world powers made it clear in 1994 that they did not care to fight genocide in central Africa, but they had yet to come up with a convincing explanation of why they were content to feed it."

"Never before in modern memory had a people who slaughtered another people, or in whose name the slaughter was carried out, been expected to live with the remainder of the people that was slaughtered, completely intermingled, in the same tiny communities, as on cohesive national society."

There were more. Truly, a great book. Makes me have little use for those, like the UN, who sit and discuss doing something about a genocide but in the end can't come to any conculsions. Doing good is necessary in this world, not just denouncing evil.(less)

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Mar 31, 2008 Jack rated it 5 of 5 stars

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

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Nov 09, 2007 Clare rated it 5 of 5 stars

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

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Sep 26, 2007 Chris McLane rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone with a conscience

Shelves: favourites

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

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Sep 11, 2011 Tim rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

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

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Feb 27, 2013 Doug rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: war

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....

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Jan 14, 2009 Kathleen Hagen added it

Shelves: 2007-audio-books, 2007-nonfiction

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

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May 15, 2013 Jacobw rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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Apr 21, 2013 Bale rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: professional, pleasure

"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

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Jan 23, 2013 Jones Jamison added it

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 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". The Hutus had been treated as second class citizens for a decade or so until a military police action had left the Hutus with a stronger military presence. Although violent action is rarely taken against members of the opposing group, general distaste for the opposite group is rampant. The two groups, by appearance, are easily identifiable form one another.

On April 6th, Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana's plane was shot down by a group of extremist Hutu's. However, the Hutu media, aligned with the Hutu political party known as Interahamwe, broadcasted that Tutsi's had shot down the presidents plane. This sparked, over the course of the next months and a half, one of, if not the largest genocide since the holocaust. It is still technically classified as a civil war, but the human right association declared it a Genocide. eight hundred thousand Tutsis were massacred over 80-90 days, and the overall death toll was closer to one million. The racial ferocity towards the Tutsis was a disaster waiting to happen, but the presidents assassination sparked the flame.

The Hutu radio station broadcasted violent messages against Tutsi oppression, and released a pseudo-official statement essentially saying "If you do not kill every Tutsi you see, you will be killed". Mostly machetes were used and every single Hutu was required to kill any Tutsi that they knew. One part of the book talks about a hotel owner who kept over fifty people safe in his complex by paying off Hutu militiamen. After two weeks the killing intensifies to the point were more than 10,000 Tutsis are being slaughtered every day. The books title comes from a priest who wrote a letter to the Cardinal of his Church branch. The Cardinal had given away the location in which the priest was hiding over two hundred people, under threat of death. The priest sent him a horrifying letter from the perspective of the two hundred people he had just killed saying "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families". The Genocide lasts a months and a half, and eight hundred thousand people, women and children, are brutally slaughtered.

I hate to use the term "resolution" in relation to the end of a genocide, so I'll call this paragraph segment "the end". The Genocide eventually winds down after 7 weeks. The country is left with a massively Hutu population left to rebuild after the massacre. Human rights organizations gave little help into assistance during during or after. The country is still an unstable place and, politically and racially, primarily Hutu. This is mostly due to the fact that the Tutsi population literally hasn't recovered yet. Even now you can still visit mass-graves amongst farming villages and old refugee camps.

There are many themes in the book, but I'd the say prominent one is how over-simplified Genocide and Ethnic cleansing can be. Society often generalized mass-killings to "bad guys vs good guys". The purpose of the book was to show how little it took in Rwanda to spark an eight hundred thousand death-ethnic cleansing. It shows how prominent this danger can be wherever you live. How even the smallest thing can lead to perhaps not a Genocide, but something similar. The situation does not always have to be racial. The book shows the amount of blind faith people can have for their political, racial, religious, or social party to the extent they are willing to kill under the assumption it's a moral obligation. (less)

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Jan 12, 2013 Derek rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: history

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

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Sep 27, 2012 Patrick Reid rated it 5 of 5 stars

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

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Jun 16, 2012 Gadi rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: library

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

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Apr 13, 2012 Susan L rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: ms-lau-clan, 2011-2012

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

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Apr 13, 2012 Molly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011-2012-advisory

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

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Mar 07, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 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 but the Belgians labeled those who had 'whiter' features as Tutsis and those who looked more traditionally 'African' as Hutus. A class bias system was put in motion.

The genocide was so horrible that it is difficult to read about. I could not help but wonder how something like this could happen in our day and age without any intervention from other nations. The book will give you the details at no expense to accuracy and detail. What amazed me is that the world watched on seemingly unaware and/or unwilling to commit to any sort of intervention. The United States, instead of intervening, held meetings to ascertain exactly how many deaths constituted genocide. While these meetings were held, hundreds of thousands Rwandans were killed.

Many of Hutus and Tutsis were intermarried, not unusual as Tutsis and Hutus were of the same race and tribe. However, the Tutsis were persecuted and killed and anyone whose family had a Tutsi member feared for their lives and those of their loved ones.

This book informed me of the role that the United Nations played (or didn't play) in this horrible time. The United Nations were dubbed 'peace keepers' but were given no real authority or weapons with which to insure peace. They were impotent to protect anyone, even themselves. They were so understaffed that they had no leverage at all. The head of the U.N. peace keepers suffered a severe case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after leaving Rwanda and wrote his own book to describe the desperation of his circumstances.

Many of us do not know that Madeline Albright was Secretary of State at the time of the Rwandan Genocide. President Clinton was not supportive of getting involved in this African nation's problems despite our nation's participating in a world convention denouncing genocide and promising to intervene at any cost. President Clinton went so far as to ask Ms. Albright to hold up an essential U.N. vote for several days that would have moved troops into Rwanda right away. Her holding up this vote caused over 100,000 additional deaths. After things settled down in Rwanda, Ms. Albright and President Clinton flew there. Ms. Albright got out of the plane to apologize to the people. President Clinton never left the plane.

The brutality of the killings and people not knowing where to turn, left this once idyllic country in ruins and turned brother against brother, family member against family member. It is a tribute to Mr. Gorovitch that he so carefully researched and documented an event that was hardly publicized and which was a holocaust of immense proportions.

I think anyone interested in Africa and its history will find this book fascinating. It is written in a series of interconnected vignettes, each a chapter, and I believe that one of the chapters served as the basis of the movie 'Hotel Rwanda'. I can't say enough about the brilliance of this book. It is difficult to read because of the painful and brutal nature of the subject matter but it reads easily, accessible to anyone who is interested whether they have any prior knowledge of Africa at all.

It will open up your eyes to the way international politics operates and at some points you may wish you had your eyes closed. However, anyone who has read this book will understand the nature of denial in its fullest sense. Mr. Gorovitch does the world proud in examining a country that many had never heard of nor were interested in. I can not thank him enough.
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Dec 23, 2011 Casey Carr rated it 5 of 5 stars

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

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Dec 13, 2011 CJ rated it 3 of 5 stars

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

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May 01, 2011 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

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

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Oct 30, 2010 Ann rated it 5 of 5 stars

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

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About Philip Gourevitch

Gourevitch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to painter Jacqueline Gourevitch and philosophy professor Victor Gourevitch, a translator of Jean Jacques Rousseau. He and his brother Marc, a physician, spent most of their childhood in Middletown, Connecticut, where their father taught at Wesleyan University from 1967 to 1995. Gourevitch graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connec...more

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“Denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good.” — 32 people liked it

“The people are living seperately together," he said. "So there is responsibility. I cry, you cry. You cry, I cry. We all come running, and the one that stays quiet, the one that stays home, must explain. Is he in league with the criminals? Is he a coward? And what would he expect when he cries? This is simple. This is normal. This is community.” — 7 people liked it

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

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