October 15, 2002
Contact: George Yatchisin
(805) 893-3494
e-mail: yatchisin-g@ sa.ucsb.edu
Prize-winning author Philip Gourevitch presents the lecture Writing about Wrongs: Moral Clarity and Political Reality at UCSB Campbell Hall
Summary Facts:
- Philip Gourevitch
- Writing about Wrongs: Moral Clarity and Political Reality
- New Yorker staff writer
- Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda
- Sunday, December 8
- 3 pm / UCSB Corwin Pavilion
- Free event
- Information: UCSB Arts & Lectures at 893-3535
Philip Gourevitch, staff writer at the New Yorker and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, will present the lecture Writing about Wrongs: Moral Clarity and Political Reality on Sunday, December 8 at 3 pm in UCSB Corwin Pavilion. This is a free event.
Philip Gourevitch went to Rwanda in 1995, mere months after at least 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered by the ruling Hutus. We Wish to Inform You is his attempt to grasp the mechanism of this terrible government-sponsored genocide, especially as the rest of the world looked on, doing little to stop the bloodshed. This powerful book not only won the National Book Critics Circle Award, but also won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The George K. Polk Award for Foreign Reporting and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Professor of Journalism at New York University Susie Linfied wrote in her Los Angeles Times review that We Wish to Inform You is “the most important book I have read in many years,” asserting, “Gourevitch’s book poses the preeminent question of our time: What—if anything—does it mean to be a human being at the end of the twentieth century?...He examines [this question] with humility, anger, grief, and a remarkable level of both political and moral intelligence.”
Gourevitch’s lecture, Writing about Wrongs: Moral Clarity and Political Reality, will discuss his work as a reporter on morally charged and often violent international political conflicts and their aftermaths. He will explore the tension between the appeal to conscience in situations of great human suffering and the great reluctance of world powers to intervene. He also will examine how intervention, even when it does take place, rarely seems to conform to the desires of professional humanitarians. The talk will question what role the United States, as the world’s major superpower, can and should take when morality and realpolitik seem at odds.
Gourevitch’s second book, A Cold Case (recently released in paperback by Picador USA), was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2001. A true tale of crime and punishment, the book probes a New York double homicide that took 30 years to solve. “A cool and measured voice, an unwillingness to flinch, is one of Gourevitch’s finest traits,” claims the San Francisco Chronicle. “Matthew Arnold said a novel by Tolstoy is not a work of art but a piece of life. For the same reason—the presence of truth and the absence of artifice—an inversion applies here: a piece of life by Philip Gourevitch is a work of art.”
In addition to his work for The New Yorker, which has thrice been a finalist for National Magazine Awards, Gourevitch’s reportage and critical essays have appeared in numerous publications including Granta, Harper’s and The New York Review of Books. His short fiction has been published in various journals including Story, Southwest Review and Zoetrope. Gourevitch is the Chair of the International Committee of PEN American Center, and a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute.
Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, books by Philip Gourevitch will be available for purchase and signing at the event. This lecture is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, and Global and International Studies as part of the lecture series Global Peace, Security and Human Rights. Additional support provided by Santa Barbara Committee on Foreign Relations, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, PAX 2100, International Students Association at SB City College, and the International Studies Program at Ventura College. The event is sponsored by KEYT 1250 AM.
For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535.
Editor: For photos, please call
George Yatchisin at (805) 893-3494.