Not as grim as I was expecting. ( )

Amazing book teaching the reader what really happened in the Rwanda genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus. Some a-hole white guy made the mistake of saying that Tutsis were more aristocratic than the Hutus (Hamitic myth). Hutus were pissed off about the fact that Tutsis belonged to the ruling class so with help from France (Mitterand), Hutus all over this small country hacked, bludgeoned and shot to death all the Tutsis they could find, in 1994. This horrible event was ignored by the international community and when Tutsi refugees tried to flee, Hutus went with them to refugee camps in Zaire and Tanzania. They knew that aid workers wouldn't know which were which, so they, along with the French and Belgium soldiers, took all the food and policed the refugee camps themselves. So, when some humanitarian organization asks you to"feed the hungry," just remember to whom your dollars will go. (Moreover, at least 75¢ out of$1 will go to overhead).
The genocide of Tutsis continued for years and years, and this struggling little nation has had to do all the work of rebuilding their home and trying to bring the genocidaires to justice without any help from the major powers who blocked their efforts every step of the way.
Gourevitch spent years researching his book. I thank the author for making me aware of a genocide that I (shockingly) just became aware of. No wonder the world hates us. ( )

An incredible recounting of the Rwandan genocide that sheds a lot of light across the atrocity of the different players and motivations involved. It is harrowing and chilling but also incredibly well written. Well worth the read whether you are interested in Rwandan history or not. ( )

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 most unfathomable human situations to have transpired in recent history. My only problem with Gourevitch is that he never really got to the red-hot human center of the Rwandan genocide: How were so many of the Hutus so completely inhuman? How could they have done what they did? It's true that he explains the history leading up to the genocide, but he never really investigates the thought processes that guided the Hutus in their rampage. Because of that, I felt like he cheated us out of a 100% complete understanding of the conflict.

Overall, however, this book was one of the most illuminating I have ever read. ( )

Incredible writing, incredibly important, yet extremely emotionally taxing. ( )