jenibo 's review for:

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch

5.0

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Truly an incredible, masterly work of reportage, this harrowing book is unforgettable in its scope and the story it tells. Gourevitch is not content to just recount the events of the genocide, both on a personal and a village wide scale. He seeks to tease out a coherent set of threads from the ethnic and historical tangle, from which we can begin to glean some understanding of some of the causes. He refuses to turn his angry lense from the Rwandan perpetrators and victims of the genocide, and concentrates painful scrutiny on the reactions of the UN during and afterwards. It is difficult to see the reactions of the developed world to the genocide as anything less tragic than the genocide itself, and impossible to see their reactions in any other way than as perpetuating the horrors, both in the immediate aftermath and much later.