Hatzfeld’s work is of great importance to understanding the Rwandan tragedy—and to the study of genocide generally.
Nearly a quarter-century after the fact, a searching look at the children of genocide in Rwanda.
French journalist/activist Hatzfeld (The Antelope's Strategy: Living in Rwanda After the Genocide, 2009, etc.), who has been writing for years on the Rwandan massacre and its aftermath, chronicles his travels across the small nation to speak with young men and women, Hutu and Tutsi alike, whose parents and grandparents were swept up in a back-and-forth violence that saw the deaths of as many as 1 million people. One young Hutu man speaks to the dire consequences of ethnicity in itself, saying that he does not speak of it—especially with members of the other major tribe. People don’t care about ethnicity in other African countries, he observes, but to this day in Rwanda, “it attracts misfortune and it blocks understanding.” He thinks further and adds, “it’s important for the ones who suffered to be clear about who suffered and who committed crimes.” That is, it’s important to assign blame—and perhaps to keep the wheels of recrimination turning. Aid workers, street people, workers: Hatzfeld is comprehensive in his choice of subjects, many of whom, though too young to remember events firsthand, keep them alive in memory for good and ill. The author himself came under suspicion as someone perhaps “inexplicably trying to rile people up” in the quest of remembrance, when most Rwandans, it seems, would sooner forget—not forgive and forget, just forget. So can genocide be ruled out as a future possibility? Almost certainly not. Says one 16-year-old Tutsi girl, wiser than her years, “deep down, a lot of young people from both ethnicities conceal a desire for revenge. That’s why so many young Rwandans are religious. They put their trust in God in order to alleviate their sorrows, in order not to stumble.” But, she adds, “We are keeping on our guard, since the threats are quiet for now.”
Hatzfeld’s work is of great importance to understanding the Rwandan tragedy—and to the study of genocide generally.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27978-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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