About this item
In this book the author explores a society in which killers and survivors live again as neighbors; it introducers readers to a post-genocide Rwanda. The book plunges into the lives of a vast cast of characters: from perpetrators and victims in tiny peasant communities to street kids, businessmen, artists, judges, the national cycling team to the country's revolutionary leaders and their opponents. As the author weighs their accounts of Rwanda's unexpected successes and its enduring weaknesses, he also revisits the wars of the genocide's aftermath that continue in Congo. And he takes critical stock of how Western conventional wisdom, with its self-exculpations and its tendency to view African politics through the reductive lenses of humanitarian pity or punitive human rights absolutism, clashes with the defiant ethic of self-determination that has guided Rwanda's reconstruction.
About the Author
Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer at The New Yorker and a contributing editor to the Forward. He has reported from Africa, Asia, and Europe for a number of magazines, including Granta, Harper's, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in New York City.
