Life Laid Bare

The Survivors in Rwanda Speak

Recommended by Philip Gourevitch, and 1 others. See all reviews

Ranked #42 in African History

To make the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda is a painful task that we have no right to shirk-it is part of being a moral adult."
-Susan Sontag

In the late 1990s, French author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld made several journeys into the hilly, marshy region of the Bugesera, one of the areas most devastated by the Rwandan genocide of April 1994, where an average of five out of six Tutsis were hacked to death with machete and spear by their Hutu neighbors and militiamen. In the villages of Nyamata and N'tarama, Hatzfeld interviewed fourteen survivors of the genocide,...
more

Reviews and Recommendations

We've comprehensively compiled reviews of Life Laid Bare from the world's leading experts.

Philip Gourevitch One of the things that writing about Rwanda doesn’t offer you – although writing about many other fascinating places does – is a substantial literature by the people you’re writing about. There just aren’t many books by Rwandans that are readily accessible to an outsider. There is a Kinyarwandan (Kinyarwanda is the language) oral tradition, there’s a lot of poetry and in the last century more and more written stuff, but little of it has been translated, and of the writing on the genocide that’s taken place – their own recent history – most of it has taken place in French or English. And most... (Source)


Similar Books

If you like Life Laid Bare, check out these similar top-rated books:


Learn: What makes Shortform summaries the best in the world?