Season of Blood

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey
by Fergal Keane

Season of Blood is an outsider’s intimate experience in post-genocide Rwanda. Keane is a BBC journalist who travels to Rwanda in the late spring of 1994. What I enjoyed most about this book was the simplicity of the narrative style. Keane recounts his experiences in Rwanda with vivid and detailed observations and the book has an episodic quality. The book does not sensationalize and he resists making judgments or conclusions about what can only be described as the horrifically complicated situation that existed in Rwanda at the time of his visit.

I read this book only a few days after finishing We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, by Phillip Gourevitch. I enjoyed Season of Blood, but I’m not sure I would have appreciated it fully without the larger context provided by the Gourevitch book.