Recommended reading: birthday books

I’m not your average girl, I can tell you.  These are the books I bought with the money I got for my birthday:

Rwanda

	Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide - The Survivors Speak Author: Jean Hatzfeld I have read this book before but wanted to own my own copy of it. I discussed this book in detail here. This is a heartbreaking book where survivors of the 1994 genocide discuss their experiences and how they survived the attacks.
	A Time for Machetes: The Rwandan Genocide - The Killers Speak Author: Jean Hatzfeld The second book from the above author but his time from the killers' perspectives. This is going to be a hard book to read and is at the bottom of the pile at the moment.  That is not to say that I don’t want to read it, it is just that I am going to read the other books first.
	The Strategy Of Antelopes: Rwanda After the Genocide Author: Jean Hatzfeld This is the final book in the set and I have been waiting for some time for this book to finally be released. The author has gone back into Rwanda and interviewed both hutus and tutsis again to discuss whether reconiliation and forgiveness is possible.

Zimbabwe

Dinner with Mugabe: The Untold Story of a Freedom Fighter Who Became a Tyrant Author: Heidi Holland I saw this book in South Africa in April and I am glad to finally have my hands on it. The book has received good reviews on Amazon and is said to be a fair attempt to understand Mugabe. In the words of the author: "Discovering that Robert Mugabe is a real person making hideous decisions is not to let him off the hook but is to observe how and why he lost his way" (Dinner with Mugabe, page xiv).

Vietnam

The Girl in the Picture: The Remarkable Story of Vietnam's Most Famous Casualty Author: Denise Chong This book has also received good reviews at Amazon and I am hoping it will give me some beginners insight into the Vietnam war; this is a topic I have been interested in my whole life but know relatively little about. It is precisely for reasons like this that I started this blog.

Cambodia

Survival in the Killing Fields Author: Haing S. Ngor It appears that with the recent genocide trials starting in Cambodia, this book has been brought back into print again which is great news because I had been struggling to get a copy of it before. The Khmer Institute has done an in-depth analysis of the inaccuracies in another book I had reviewed on Cambodia, First They Killed My Father.  This book is on their list of recommended books to read and thus I am looking forward to reading it.