We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch (Picador: September 1, 1999) – offers a concise and thorough picture of the history, the genocide and the immediate aftermath.

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda, by Jean Hatzfield (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: June 15, 2005) This book features the testimony of 10 friends from the same village who spent day after day together, fulfilling orders to kill any Tutsi within their territory during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. While their anecdotes are shocking at first, they detail how an ordinary person with an everyday life in a farming village can be transformed into a killer.

When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by

Mahmood Mamdani (Princeton University Press: August 12, 2002) – An influential Ugandan scholar details the colonial past, the regional issues and the political factors that gave rise to the Hutu Power movement and genocide.

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power (Perennial: May 1, 2003) – from Armenia to Cambodia to Bosnia to Rwanda, Power examines why the words “never again” ring empty.

Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Romeo A. Dallaire (Carroll and Graf: October 10, 2004) – Dallaire (played by Nick Nolte in the movie Hotel Rwanda), has continued to call the UN and other foreign governments to account for their abandonment of Rwanda. This book details the military picture from an insider’s point of view.

Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda by Alison Des Forges (Human Rights Watch: March, 1999)

Justice on the Grass: Three Rwandan Journalists, Their Trial for War Crimes and a Nation's Quest for Redemption by Dina Temple-Raston (Free Press: March 1, 2005) Quickly tracing the history of Rwanda and the course of the 1994 genocide there, Temple-Raston focuses on the Hutu Radio Télévision Libre de Mille Collines (RTLM), and the resulting trial of the men who ran it.

Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculee Ilibagiza (Hay House: 2006). The true story of Ilibagiza’s survival of the genocide by hiding in a bathroom with seven other women for 91 days. From the jacket: “She emerged...having truly discovered the meaning of unconditional love.”

Dead Aid:  Why Aid is Not Working and How There is a Better Way for Africa by Dambisa Moyo (Penguin Books - 2009) –

Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General