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THE RWANDA CRISIS

Name: THE RWANDA CRISIS
Author: Gérard Prunier
ISBN: 0-231-10408-1

HISTORY OF A GENOCIDE

by Gérard Prunier ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 1995

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Painstaking analysis of the 1994 civil war in the central African nation of Rwanda, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were slaughtered. Genocide seems a species of unforeseeable madness, writes the author, a French social scientist. It is not: It is ``a historical product, not a biological fatality or a `spontaneous' bestial outburst.'' In the case of Rwanda, the extreme enmity between the Tutsi and Hutu is the result of a long history of Belgian, German, and French colonialism that played on and amplified existing ethnic tensions, tensions exacerbated by one of the highest population densities in the world and what the author deems ``an almost monstrous degree of social control,'' loosened and ultimately undone by rural unrest. When that social control dissolved, the final ``historical product'' was the deaths of at least 800,000 people and the displacement of another two million—and all this out of a total population of seven million. Prunier offers a heavily documented account of the Rwandan civil war, one that allows the nonspecialist to follow the complex waves of history that washed over that unfortunate nation only a year ago. He also stresses the urgent question of how this horror could have occurred in our time. Considering modern theories of violence and ethnic strife, Prunier concludes that the genocide served as a vehicle for self-identification: to preserve ``a certain vision [the Tutsi and Hutu] have of themselves, of the others and of their place in the world.'' It also occurred, he says, because of blind obedience, fear, self-interest, and overpopulation. The last will emerge ever more prominently in future wars, Prunier predicts. ``Genocides are a modern phenomenon—they require organisation—and they are likely to become more frequent.'' If genocides are indeed the wave of the future, this may become a primary textbook for understanding why.

Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1995

ISBN: 0-231-10408-1

Page Count: 250

Publisher: Columbia Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995

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CODE TALKER

by Chester Nez with Judith Schiess Avila ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2011

A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.

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A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.

At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.

A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.

Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011

ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Dutton Caliber

Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.