Philip Gourevitch: Memory is a disease

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:31:00 +0000

On July 25, Philip Gourevitch gave the keynote address to the Human Rights Lecture Series at Stanford University. A long-time staff writer for The New Yorker, Gourevitch has written about the Iraq War and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, French politics, and conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. His account of the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was included in the Guardian’s list of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. In 2009, Gourevitch started reporting again from Rwanda.

We met over drinks before his lecture to discuss the challenges of writing about the history that we are in the midst of making, the burdens of memory and the appeal of forgetting, the dangers of narrative simplification, the limits of humanitarianism, and the messiness of politics.

Salon.com > Literary Reportage

Philip Gourevitch: Memory is a disease