A Saddened Awakening...

The Background
In 1994, by most native accounts, up to 800,000 Rwandan citizens were massacred during a mass genocide of Tutsis by an opposing and recently-formed Hutu majority. Longtime friends and neighbors turned upon each other in a shocking example of human capacity for violence and hatred. Thousands of families had to leave their homes at a day's notice and flee for their lives. Countless atrocities took place with little or no regard for the value of human life. Most of the international press gave the tragedy little or no attention whatsoever. After it became certain that there would be no intervention from international forces, despite repeated pleas for assistance to the UN and other international organizations, a coalition of native forces was formed and a semblance of order was restored with some difficulty. Although Rwanda is now somewhat stable, the scars from what occurred there remain upon everyone's hearts and souls.
The Book
Gourevitch's book is both unsentimental and compassionate, a balance that makes the book leave quite a lasting impression. His writing holds both more gritty elements of journalism, making it an informative account of what the general area of Rwanda was like around 1994, and elements of human empathy, adding a very moving and personal aspect to the book. Gourevitch sheds light on how the media affects the tide of world events and how culture and other complicated stimuli may affect an individual's point of view or actions. He seems to accurately capture the rather astounding way in which a person's basic ideological tenet's can be so easily confused and overturned when the social fabric around one degenerates into hysteria. The book had a fairly riveting effect on me in terms of it causing me to reconsider how stable our cultural mores really are. When Gourevitch records personal accounts of victims' families slaughtered by neighbors and friends of several decades, one tends to wonder how little it may take for basic instincts of kill-or-be-killed to override a general sense of social normality.
Gourevitch's writing was well-honed and truly a pleasure to read. He is able to effectively get across his personal take on a person he meets or a situation he encounters without distracting the reader with his own idiosyncrasies. I felt like I could easily identify with his gut reaction without feeling as if I was being proselytized to. Perhaps this was out of a coincidental, similar way of thinking, but I suspect it is a facility many others would see in his writing as well.
With the recent assassination of Congo's Laurent Kabila and the complicated political maneuvering behind the UN's investigation into the atrocities mentioned above, it is obvious that these conflicts are far from resolved. This book provides a useful background of what led to many of these conflicts on a very human level.