Backgrounder: Philip Gourevitch

By Maria Rosa

Philip Gourevitch
Philip Gourevitch. Photo: Jacqueline Gourevitch. Photo © Philip Gourevitch 2004.

RELATED:

Lecture: Philip Gourevitch

Philip Gourevitch has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1997. He often takes a political stance in his writing, covering issues of both international and domestic importance.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1961. Although he received an M.F.A. in fiction from Columbia University in 1992, he is most famous for his nonfiction work.

Gourevitch won the National Book Critic’s Circle Award for his first book, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda (1998), a shatteringly powerful account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, in which the Hutu majority massacred the minority Tutsi population. An estimated 800,000 Tutsi were slaughtered in 100 days, from April to July, ‘94. According to Gourevitch, “People were murdered at a rate that exceeded by three times the speed of the extermination of Jews during the Holocaust.”

Rwandan newspaper and radio played a fundamental role in the genocide. The radio station run by the Hutu leadership, RTLM (Radio-Television Libre Milles Collines), was extremely influential. “It was a radio dedicated entirely to entertainment and genocidal propaganda,” Gourevitch said, in an interview with the PBS program Frontline. “Sometimes they actually had disc jockeys who would say, ‘So-and-so has just fled. He is said to be moving down such-and-such street.’ And they would literally hunt an individual who was targeted in the street.”

The book’s title refers to a letter seven or eight Tutsi pastors wrote to their Adventist church leader, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, asking for protection. A few thousand Tutsi were staying at the church’s headquarters in Mugonero, which they hoped would be a safe haven; the lead Tutsi pastors had been told that they and the other Tutsis would be killed on the next day. Rather than heeding the pastors’ plea for help, Ntakirutimana, a Hutu, aided the killers.

Gourevitch opens the book with a description of the church site, where the skeletons of the pastors and other Tutsis who sought refuge in the sanctuary are now on display. The skeletons remain untouched, just as the murderers left them, as a memorial to the genocide.

Although he is world renowned for his work on the genocide, Gourevitch’s writing addresses a broad range of subjects, from domestic politics to true crime. In 2001, he published A Cold Case, the true story of Andy Rosenzweig, a police investigator in New York who spent 30 years chasing an escaped killer named Frank Koehler.

A Cold Case is rich in quotes from both Rosenzweig and Koehler. In a review, Scott W. Helman of The Boston Globe wrote, “The book is not remarkable for Gourevitch’s writing; it’s remarkable for his listening - which is what he does best. It’s not what he makes happen but what he lets happen that makes A Cold Case a succinct, extraordinary read.”

Maria Rosa is a sophomore majoring in print journalism at NYU.

SOURCES

RELATED LINKS


ARTICLE URL

/publishing/archives/bullpen/philip_gourevitch/backgrounder/