Living in Rwanda After the Genocide By Jean Hatzfeld (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 242 pp., $25)

The Antelope’s Strategy:

Killing Neighbors: Webs of Violence in Rwanda By Lee Ann Fujii (Cornell University Press, 212 pp., $29.95)

After Genocide: Transitional Justice, Post- Conflict Reconstruction and Reconciliation in Rwanda and Beyond Edited by Phil Clark and Zachary D. Kaufman (Columbia University Press, 399 pp., $50)

A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster By Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 353 pp., $27.95)

I.

The subject of catastrophe invites the high eloquence of writers, the explanatory power of historians, and the deepest empathy of ordinary people. But the aftermath of catastrophe--that is not yet a subject to which many people kindle. Most of us prefer to back away from the scene of torment, with its inconsolable survivors and its insoluble problems. The survivors, though, cannot back away. They continue to live where the others died. Jean Améry, tortured at Auschwitz, wrote powerfully about the world’s readiness to isolate the survivor, who is unable to join in “the peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future.”