Machete Season
The Killers in Rwanda Speak
by Jean Hatzfeld
Recommended by Jocko Willink and Sam Harris
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Should I read this?
Recommended by 4 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, History, and Nonfiction.
During the spring of 1994, in a tiny country called Rwanda, some 800,000 people were hacked to death, one by one, by their neighbors in a gruesome civil war. Several years later, journalist Jean Hatzfeld traveled to Rwanda to interview ten participants in the killings, eliciting extraordinary testimony from these men about the genocide they perpetr...
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Why recommended
Recommended by 4 sources and appears in Most Recommended Books, History, and Nonfiction.
Recommended by notable people
People and public figures who have recommended this book.
Recommendation Signals
Recommendation proof is sourced from public posts, interviews, reading lists, and cited references.
Sam Harris
“If you want to see what it?s like when things go about as wrong as they can go, read ?Machete Season,? which is a short book about the Rwandan genocide that is, if I recall correctly, entirely borne of interviews with some of the main perpetrators of this genocide. So not merely the people who were swinging the machetes, but the people who were running those gangs and enforcing people?s membership therein.They invite you in there and they give you the full tour. It is uncanny that circumstances can come together culturally, neurophysiologically and otherwise so as to produce this kind of behaviour again with a clear conscience. So it is a short book and a very sobering one worth reading, if you can stomach that sort of thing. | If you want to see what it’s like when things go about as wrong as they can go, read “Machete Season,” which is a short book about the Rwandan genocide that is, if I recall correctly, entirely borne of interviews with some of the main perpetrators of this genocide. So not merely the people who were swinging the machetes, but the people who were running those gangs and enforcing people’s membership therein.They invite you in there and they give you the full tour. It is uncanny that circumstances can come together culturally, neurophysiologically and otherwise so as to produce this kind of behaviour again with a clear conscience. So it is a short book and a very sobering one worth reading, if you can stomach that sort of thing.”
Appears In
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Each recommendation is collected from a public source — interviews, articles, or curated lists — and linked to its original URL. Books with many verifiable recommendations from respected people rank higher.