Shake Hands With The Devil

Oct 8, 2024 7:47 AM

Author:Romeo Dallaire

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD

'Indisputably the best account of the whole terrible Rwandan genocide.' R. W. Johnson, Sunday Times

'Angry, accusatory and extremely moving.' Caroline Moorhead, Spectator

When Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire received the call to serve as force commander of the UN mission to Rwanda, he thought he was heading off to Africa to help two warring parties achieve a peace both sides wanted. Instead, he and members of his small international force were caught up in a vortex of civil war and genocide. Dallaire left Rwanda a broken man; disillusioned, suicidal, and determined to tell his story.

An award-winning international sensation, Shake Hands with the Devil is a landmark contribution to the literature of war: a remarkable tale of a soldier's courage and an unforgettable portrait of modern warfare. It is also a stinging indictment of the petty bureaucrats who refused to give Dallaire the men and the operational freedom he needed to stop the killing. 'I know there is a God,' Dallaire writes, 'because in Rwanda I shook hands with the devil. I have seen him, I have smelled him and I have touched him. I know the devil exists and therefore I know there is a God.'

'Read Roméo Dallaire's profoundly sad and moving book.' Madeleine Albright, Washington Post

Reviews

Shake Hands With The Devil is one of the saddest books I have ever read and one of the most heart-breaking eye-witness accounts.A kind of naive and painfully honest confession of the failure of an organisation, a meticulous description of one of the worst betrayals in the history of humanity.

—— Guardian

indisputably the best account of the whole terrible Rwandan genocide

—— The Sunday Times

Although this is a deeply personal book, it is undoubtedly an important historical record of the UN's failure in Rwanda and an impassioned plea against the moral cowardice that allowed the genocide to happen.

—— The Independent

No historian of the past century has been more accessible

—— Niall Ferguson , Sunday Telegraph

An almost faultless masterpiece

—— Observer

Highly original and penetrating ... No one who has digested this enthralling work will ever be able to look at the period again in quite the same way

—— Sunday Telegraph

Keegan's power as a writer derives from the fact that he does not see himself merely as a chronicler of battles, but as a student of the human condition. It is the breadth of his grasp of civilisation, as well as of the soldier's art, that makes this book so formidable.

—— Max Hastings , Evening Standard

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