Bad News

December 21, 2015
Journalist Sundaram (Stringer) takes an affecting, if draining, look at conditions in Rwanda from April 2009 to December 2013. Focusing on his experiences with a program that trained Rwandans as journalists, he describes his relationships with his students and his struggle, as President Kagame's government grew more repressive, to find new ones. The book opens with Sundaram investigating the sound of an explosion, only to be informed by a police officer that he imagined it. This moment of state-mandated disconnection between reality and perception is just the first of many the book explores, at times powerfully. The cumulative effect, however, is exhausting. Students come and go from Sundaram's class, but there are a few that he clearly admires and considers friends. Gibson, a student of particular talent, struggles after being placed under government surveillance. Moses, another such student, is a survivor of the genocide, and one of the most poignant moments occurs when Sundaram accompanies Moses to a genocide memorial. These relationships add a measure of warmth to a book that comes to feel endlessly bleak. Despite the wearying grimness, this is an important book for students of political science, modern history, and journalism.

October 1, 2015
A journalist's memoir of training reporters during a dangerous time in Rwanda. Sundaram (Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo, 2014), who previously received a Reuters journalism award for his reporting from Congo, "had come to Rwanda to teach journalists how to identify, research and write news stories." The program, funded by the United Kingdom and the European Union and approved by the Rwandan government, was mandated to report "mostly on government initiatives." Under the leadership of President Paul Kagame, the country had been praised for its progress since the 1994 genocide, but Sundaram was learning from his students the perils of veering from the "official" good news. He heard stories of journalists who were harassed, beaten, or thrown into jail after criticizing the government or merely reporting existing problems such as poverty. The country's popular independent newspaper, Umuseso, was shut down. Another editor/reporter was hounded and on the run after he started a magazine with a story about malnutrition. With unfettered power came absurdities. The government ordered villages to tear off their thatched roofs because they were primitive. A local pastor was arrested after telling villagers to "stop destroying their huts until the government built them replacements." While people were getting sick from living outside, flowers became "obligatory in the workplace." In spots, the book reads like a thriller, but the writing, more descriptive than crisp, doesn't sustain the tautness. Sundaram's talents show in his creation of an atmosphere of paranoia and dread. In this setting, the author began to wonder whom he could trust. An appendix provides a listing of reporters who were fired from their jobs, forced to leave the country, beaten, jailed, or killed. In this climate, it became nearly impossible to find journalists for his program, which eventually shut down. A chilling account of reporters in danger that heightens awareness of the importance of a free press.

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November 1, 2015

Journalist and author (Stringer) Sundaram spent months in Rwanda, educating local journalists who were being harassed, intimidated, expelled, coopted, tortured, or murdered by the forces of Rwandan dictator president Paul Kagame. With appendixes listing the governments (United States, British), multilateral institutions (European Union, United Nations, International Monetary Fund), and foundations (Gates, Clinton), Sundaram's memoir seeks to expose the rotten dictatorship beneath the surface of the apparently stable, "democratic" postgenocide government of Rwanda. Readers of Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, Philip Gourevitch's We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, and Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda will be interested, but not happy, to learn the bad news that 20 years after the genocide witnessed by the world, the world's governments are supporting the regime that claims to have ended the mass killings but represses both critical news and the bearers of that news. VERDICT This nonfiction version of George Orwell's 1984 is essential for anyone paying attention to African politics. [See Prepub Alert, 7/13/15.]--Joel Neuberg, Santa Rosa Junior Coll. Lib., CA

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November 1, 2015
Award-winning journalist Sundaram (Stringer, 2013) taught his trade in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda. Under President Kagame, Rwanda has struggled to overcome its history of genocidal horror and present an image of stability. But underneath is a troubling mixture of press repression and a government using genocide memorials to get aid from Western nations even as it continues to instill fear in the populace. Sundaram's students were both Hutus and Tutsi, from families that were on both sides of the genocide, killers and slaughtered. He watched students struggle to report events in a complicated developing nation, seeing one capitulate and join the legions of sycophants praising Kagame to curry favor. Among his students were those who faced beatings, torture, and imprisonment and were likely to see more of the same if they continued their efforts to expose government shortcomings or even reported on the most innocuous issues, such as improving health care or nutrition. A powerful account of a nation 20 years later, still trying to recover from shocking genocide.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)