About An Ordinary Man:
As his country was being torn apart by violence during the Rwandan genocide of 1994, hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina—the "Oskar Schindler of Africa"—refused to bow to the madness that surrounded him. Confronting killers with a combination of diplomacy, flattery, and deception, he offered shelter to more than twelve thousand members of the Tutsi clan and Hutu moderates, while homicidal mobs raged outside with machetes.
An Ordinary Man explores what the Academy Award-nominated film Hotel Rwanda could not: the inner life of the man who became one of the most prominent public faces of that terrible conflict. Rusesabagina tells for the first time the full story of his life—growing up as the son of a rural farmer, the child of a mixed marriage, his extraordinary career path which led him to become the first Rwandan manager of the Belgian-owned Hotel Milles Collines—all of which contributed to his heroic actions in the face of such horror. He will also bring the reader inside the hotel for those one hundred terrible days depicted in the film, relating the anguish of those who watched as their loved ones were hacked to pieces and the betrayal that he felt as a result of the UN’s refusal to help at this time of crisis.
About the First-Year Reading Program: All first-year students entering in the fall of 2009 will receive a copy of An Ordinary Man at SOAR. During pre-semester orientation (Viking Venture), students met with their First-Year Seminar classmates, usually in their instructors' homes, for a pizza dinner, followed by a book discussion. This shared intellectual experience at the start of their college careers offers students an opportunity to get to know each other, their advisors and first-year mentors. Through conversation about the book and the issues it raises, students are welcomed into the Berry College community.
Paul Rusesabagina will deliver the Conson Wilson Lecture at Berry on September 29, 2009.
