We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (Bestselling Backlist)

"[It is the] sobering voice of witness that Gourevitch has vividly captured in his work."— Wole Soyinka , The New York Times Book Review "[Gourevitch] has the mind of a scholar along with the observative capacity of a good novelist, and he writes like an angel. This volume establishes him as the peer of Michael Herr, Ryszard Kapuscinski, and Tobias Wolff. I think there is no limit to what we may expect from him."— Robert Stone "A sobering, revealing, and deeply thoughtful chronicle."— The Boston Globe "The most important book I have read in many years . . . [Gourevitch] examines [the genocidal war in Rwanda] with humility, anger, grief and a remarkable level of both political and moral intelligence."— Susie Linfield , Los Angeles Times "Shocking and important . . . clear and balanced . . . the voice in this book is meticulous and humane."-- Michael Pearson , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution "Astonishing . . . [Gourevitch] is masterful at placing the unspeakability of mass murder into actual people's mouths and inhabiting it in actual people's stories."— Mark Gevisser , Newsday "Unsettlingly beautiful . . . brilliant . . . this is a staggeringly good book . . . [It] should be on bookshelves forever."— Tom Engelhardt , The Philadelphia Inquirer From the Publisher "A staggeringly good book...Gourevitch's beautiful writing drives you deep into Rwanda, his brilliant reportage tells you everything that can be seen from an event beyond imagining or explaining...He drives you, in fact, right up against the limits of what a book can do." --Tom Engelhardt, Philadelphia Inquirer "[It is the] sobering voice of witness that Gourevitch has vividly captured in his work." --Wole Soyinka, The New York Times Book Review "I know of few books, fiction or non-fiction, as compelling as Philip Gourevitch's account of the Rwandan genocide....As a journalist [Gourevitch] has raised the bar on us all." --Sebastian Junger "The most important book I have read in many years...Gourevitch's book poses the preeminent question of our time: What--if anything--does it mean to be a human being at the end of the 20th century?...He examines [this question] with humility, anger, grief and a remarkable level of both political and moral intelligence." --Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times "Thoughtful, beautifully written, and important...we want to pass it along to our friends, and to insist that they read it because the information it contains seems so profoundly essential." --Francine Prose, Elle 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families Part One Leontius, the son of Aglaion, was coming up from the Peiraeus, close to the outer side of the north wall, when he saw some dead bodies lying near the executioner, and he felt a desire to look at them, and at the same time felt disgust at the thought, and tried to turn aside. For some time he fought with himself and put his hand over his eyes, but in the end the desire got the better of him, and opening his eyes wide with his fingers he ran forward to the bodies, saying, "There you are, curse you, have your fill of the lovely spectacle." --PLATO, The Republic Decimation means the killing of every tenth person in a population, and in the spring and early summer of 1994 a program of massacres decimated the Republic of Rwanda. Although the killing was lowtech--performed largely by machete--it was carried out at dazzling speed: of an original population of about seven and a half million, at least eight hundred thousand people were killed in just a hundred days. Rwandans often speak of a million deaths, and they may be right. The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES. Copyright © 1998 by Philip Gourevitch. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010. Read more