Gourevitch - a New Yorker staffer - is not afraid to take sides, pass judgement and pack a punch with his journalese-cum-ethnographic style. If, as happens with most humanitarian incidents/phases and atrocities, you feel that a sense of outrage is appropriate about the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s but are not exactly clear on the complexities of the case then this is the book for you.
Gourevitch offers - albeit perhaps unintentionally - a fantastic beginner's guide to understanding the situation in Rwanda. We're not talking dry facts: we are talking about hearing the crack of dead bodies underfoot, coming to terms with the unbearable truth of your neighbour turning on you with a machete, grasping the understated heroism that saves lives, clenching your teeth at the apathetic shrug of the shoulders by genocide criminals confronted by their actions and... asking why the UN exists when it is so criminally implicated in facilitating genocide.
Which is not to say that you should simply ascribe to the direction that Gourevitch's outrage takes; but you ought to be sustained by some sense of rage as a result of reading his offering. If the subjective, the emotional, the ideological is not for you - well, Gourevitch delivers on the opposite front too. Delving, necessarily, into issues of ethnicity, conflict and the nation there is enough ethnographic substance here to whet your intellectual appetite.
Indeed, Gourevitch's style may mark the beginning of a new way of writing ethnography that demonstrates how disciplines like anthropology can argue their relevance to the "real" world.
Having said all of the above, I found myself in a curious position of not being able to put the book down on one hand, and on the other hand feeling a need to disentangle my own responses and thoughts from what are - to the newcomer to Rwanda - overwhelming revelations and the sometimes overbearing judgement of the book's author.
Read this!
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