Reviewed by Suzi Steffen      

Those who have seen the movie Hotel Rwanda may believe that reading Paul Rusesabagina's memoir, An Ordinary Man, would be redundant. After all, he wrote it--with writer Tom Zoellner--after the film had already come out and been nominated for many Academy Awards. What tricks would memory play after the movie had seemed to create reality? The truth is that his memoir of the April 1994 massacre of Tutsi-identified Rwandans contains both more and less than the movie. There is no critical scene on the roof of the hotel, for instance; there is no definitive and sickening moment of driving over corpses in the road. That is because every page reveals the surreal pressure and horror of Rusesabagina's survival attempts—and success at keeping more than twelve hundred of his colleagues, friends and family alive.       

As he reveals the choices he had to make, the bargains he felt forced into in order to live, Rusesabagina stops short of appearing the perfect hero of the movie. He's vulnerable and arrogant, proud of himself and furious at those, from U.N. General Romeo Dallaire to U.S. President Bill Clinton, who did not intervene. With cold calculation, he explains how little money it would have cost the U.S. to jam the radio signals that led the waiting Hutus to "cut down the tall trees"—massacre the Tutsis—and compares that amount of money to one day of the relief the U.S. provided in the refugee camps. (Prevention, of course, would have been far less expensive.)      

Rusesabagina's philosophical musings may become a tad tiresome by the end of the book, but what matters is the burning luck and courage at the heart of this hotel manager's narrative. Don't read it for its literary qualities (though it is well written); read it because it must be read.