When I read this book five years ago, I had this to say about it, according to my infallible records:

“The book was quietly sensational—while Gourevitch detailed some of the atrocities committed against the Tutsi and described some of the scenes that met his eyes, he didn’t deliberately try to shock his readers. Gourevitch seems to realize that any thinking person would be shocked by the horrors which occurred in Rwanda.

At the same time, there was an interesting passage midway through the book—Gourevitch is talking to another American in a bar, and the man says ‘genocide is like a cheese sandwich.’ Gourevitch asks how this is, and the man replies that ‘What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich? Genocide genocide genocide,’ the man says. ‘Cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich, cheese sandwich.’

In a world where media barrages the senses with endless reports of atrocities, this may be to some extent correct. The word ‘genocide’ is thrown around a great deal, but rarely acted upon. Did the UN believe that what was happening in Rwanda wasn’t genocide? Or did they fall into the cheese sandwich mentality? As Gourevitch points out via Stalin, one death is a tragedy, while a million are a statistic. The media focuses so on violence that it almost seems to be condoning violence. Violence gets readers. Yet, reading about mass murder somewhere far away detaches the reader somewhat. I’ve read news analyses of the genocide and thought ‘oh, troubles in some African country again, ho hum.’ My reaction to a cheese sandwich is similar.

What must the world do in order to elevate mass murder to some sort of chocolate cake proportions, where everyone will take notice and action? Few people are willing to leave a chocolate cake uneaten/discussed. One would like to imagine that few people would be willing to leave genocide unstopped/undiscussed, and yet we have at least two recent instances of genocide which have gone by largely without fanfare. Yes, there has been extensive media coverage. But that was it. No nation rose up in 1994 and said ‘hey, we’re going to send troops and stop this genocide.’”

If you haven’t read this book, you should, because it’s a fascinating glimpse into the events of the Rwandan genocide, and into genocide in general. It’s also a sobering lesson, and a searing indictment of the international community.

Gourevitch is a really great author. As I said in the passage above, he doesn’t go out of his way to shock or surprise readers, he just quietly lays out his information and lets readers draw their own conclusions. He writes, for example, about visiting the Holocaust Museum, where staffers wear buttons which say “never again,” and reading a paper while he waits in line with a photograph of a river choked with Rwandan bodies. He writes about visiting a memorial and stepping on the skulls of the dead, and he writes about meeting murders and victims, politicians and generals.

What happened in Rwanda is generally agreed, now, to be a genocide, but at the time, the international community largely ignored it. He suggests that this may have been due to the recent American failure in Somalia, which created a reluctance among Americans to intervene. Because America didn’t want to accept that there was a genocide going on, Gourevitch says, America pressured the world into refusing to define it as one.

It took a united group of African nations begging for assistance to intervene to get the world to wake up, and by then, the genocide was largely over, and almost one million Rwandans had died at the hands of friends, neighbors, teachers, priests. What happened in Rwanda didn’t require sophisticated technology; most people killed with machetes, or with their bare hands, and it was still devastatingly effective.

The 20th century has been filled with genocide and inaction, which makes me wonder how much we learn from history. The situation in Rwanda was exacerbated by artificially created distinctions, and by confused media: at first, some media outlets painted the Hutus as the victims, and the Tutsis as the aggressors. Even once that was straightened out, there seemed to be a willful ignorance of the fact that the refugee camps were filled with people who had participated in the genocide, not innocent victims. Most of the victims were dead, beyond the assistance of the UNHCR.

Do we have a moral obligation to intervene in a genocide? In 1948, signatories to the genocide convention said we did. Yet, when the chips are down, we seem reluctant to act, unless it somehow benefits our own interests. I’m not sure what this says about us as a society, let alone as human beings. To stand by while others suffer seems to me the ultimate evil, yet meddling in the affairs of others is deeply repugnant to me. When does ordinary war cross the line into genocide, and how are we supposed to respond to it when it does?

We say that we will always remember, and that it will never happen again. Yet, we seem to be doing a lot of forgetting, because it keeps happening, over and over.

Demographics:

We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, by Philip Gourevitch. Published 1998, 356 pages. History.

Who was Alfred Loomis? That’s the question posed in Tuxedo Park, written by someone who was originally researching the life of a relative, William Richards. Along the way, she encountered the mysterious and very present figure of Alfred Loomis, and she decided to learn more about him. The result was this book, which was extremely interesting and very informative.

The focal point of the book is a discussion of Loomis’ contributions to the military technology of the Second World War. Wars tend to bring about radical developments in the fields of science and technology, and the Second World War was no exception. All sorts of things emerged from scientific laboratories during the war, and many of them were put to use.

When you think of scientific developments of the war, you can’t help but think of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bomb, but this just scratches the surface of the developments in research made by the war. Tuxedo Park discusses the development and refinement of radar, which came to be overshadowed in the public eye by the atom bomb, although it was no less important.

Indeed, Conant argues that without the development of radar, Germany might well have won the war; radar enabled the British to start fighting back against German airstrikes, and it allowed us to attack the u-boats which were preying on shipping. “Radar won the war, and the atom bomb ended it,” said one of the people who worked on radar in Loomis’ MIT lab, and maybe he was right.

Alfred Loomis sounds like a pretty interesting character. He came from money, but he had a passion for science, and despite doing very well on Wall Street, he craved acceptance from the scientific community. He turned a mansion in the district of Tuxedo Park into a scientific gathering place, offering companionship of notable scientists and lab space to anyone who wanted to drop in, but he was always to some extent viewed as an outsider.

Until the war, when he turned his Wall Street acumen to developing technology which would win the war. Loomis had a totally different attitude about getting things done, and he may well be directly responsible for the rapidity at which new technology was developed. By pushing things through and demanding that his team try their hardest, Loomis sponsored a culture of scientific excellence and innovation.

And now, he seems largely forgotten. Perhaps because of his controversial divorce and remarriage to a much younger woman after the close of the war. Maybe because his achievements were overshadowed by the work of the Manhattan Project. And maybe because he enjoyed obscurity, and working out of the limelight. Whatever the reason, I had never heard of him, and I was glad I picked up this book and learned a bit more about him.

Demographics:

Tuxedo Park, by Jennet Conant. Published 2002, 331 pages. Biography.

When I was fairly young, I was very interested in horse racing, thanks to reading the Black Stallion series by Walter Farley, which has a…very idealistic view of the sport. There is something deeply compelling about watching horses which have been bred to run thundering around a track, muscles pumping, and there’s something especially thrilling about watching an underdog entry pull ahead for the win, and following the bloodlines of famous race horses. And, of course, I was especially enthralled by the Derby, which is probably the biggest event in American horse racing.

As I grew older, I learned that racing has a dark side, and I grew less enchanted by the sport, but I still follow the Derby results. I suspect that a lot of Americans are in my position, feeling repulsion for, yet interest in racing.

This year’s Derby was marred by the collapse of filly Seven Belles at the end of the race; while she came in second, she shattered her front ankles doing it, and she was euthanized on the track. Hearing that news, my heart ached not only for the filly, but for all the horses in the racing industry, which is swift, demanding, and brutal.

I heard on NPR that all of the horses running in this year’s Derby were descendants of Native Dancer, which just goes to underscore how inbred the industry is becoming. Horses are being overbred for racing, with breeders attempting to produce horses which mature quickly, so they can start racing at two, while developing strong bodies which are capable of immense speed and stamina. I can’t help but wonder if the Thoroughbred breed is declining as a result of single-minded focus on a few bloodlines.

I couldn’t find any statistics on injuries at the track, known as breakdowns, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they are up. Not only because of inbreeding, but because horses are being driven further and harder than they were in the past. Most three year old horses are simply not equipped for the grueling work of the Derby, filly or not.

A commentary in the New York Times pointed out that racing seems to get a free pass from animal activists, and while this is not strictly true, it does bear some thinking. It is a brutal sport. Of the horses bred for racing, some make it to the track, while others are sold at auction, and often picked up by people in dressage, jumping, and other equestrian sports. Of the horses that hit the track, only a fraction of those really succeed. Most are brutally worked until they are no longer useful, and then they are killed, because their bloodlines aren’t good enough for breeding.

I read a justification of the racing industry which said that if football injuries and basketball injuries and so forth were as heavily covered and televised as horse racing injuries, those sports would have critics too. But I think that’s a faulty argument. For one thing, most breakdowns are not covered and televised, and we never hear about them. For another, the people who participate in those sports choose to do so, knowing the risks. Thoroughbreds aren’t given a choice; we force them to compete, and therefore we are responsible for what happens to them.

I think people have this image that when a horse “retires,” it gets to go live on a happy farm with other horses. In fact, when racehorses retire, they have a couple of options. They can be slaughtered, they can be sold to people who don’t mind retraining them for other tasks, or they can be relocated to breeding farms.

Certainly, some race horses do have ok lives, especially after their racing careers end and they aren’t spending hours in a stall every day. But the vast majority of them have pretty crappy lives, and I think that’s a great pity. “Animals are not ours for entertainment,” says PETA, and I think they’re right. I can’t quite fathom racing as a “noble sport” anymore, and I don’t see the death of Seven Belles as noble either; I see it as evidence of an endemic problem within our culture and the racing community.

Jane Smiley wrote a piece for the New York Times about racing, arguing that the problem is more with American racing than racing in general, and she may well be right. Americans have a tendency to take things to the next level, and we run our horses fast and hard on dirt, a far cry from the more gentle races on turf in Europe. European horses are champions in their own right, and they are far less likely to break down, perhaps because of a culture which values them intrinsically, in addition to idolizing their speed and grace.

I’m not saying that American trainers, jockeys, breeders, and others in the industry don’t value horses. Obviously, they do, and many people in the industry are quite passionate about Thoroughbreds, because they are remarkable horses. But behind it all, there’s a bottom line.

Win. At any cost.