Rwanda

I saw the movie Hotel Rwanda a few weeks ago, and it inspired me to seek out Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda.
The movie is chilling -- psychologically taut and compelling. At times it feels like a horror movie, perhaps because it captures the real-life horror of genocide taking place in the world in 1994.
Gourevitch's books is an expansion of reports he wrote for The New Yorker magazine. I think he's one of the finest foreign correspondents I've read. His reporting on North Korea has been frightening but also extremely perceptive.
We Wish To Inform You, meanwhile, is just what I was wanting to read after the movie: more history, more analysis, more reportage, to try to discover more meaning from the slaughter of a million people. To call the genocide "senseless" is almost a cop-out: It lets us off the hook of trying to understand precisely what happened. Gourevitch is very sensitive to that dynamic, and he is not afraid to make value judgements based on his extensive reporting of the facts at hand.
PS Gourevitch recently became editor of the Paris Review.