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| Me Against My Brother | 
| Manufacturer: Taylor & Francis
Category: EBooks
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $22.36
You Save: $5.59 (20%)
Avg. Customer Rating:  28 reviews
Sales Rank: 56891
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Dewey Decimal Number: 327
ASIN: B000PLXCD6
Publication Date: April 16, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 Famine, combat, and mass graves August 26, 2003
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
A very brief review of Scott Peterson's macabre book would simply say "Chilling, gruesome, and violent". This book is a must read for anybody curious about the UN or US missions to Africa and the seemingly endless violence that occurs there on massive scales. As I write this, Rwanda is struggling to hold an election after the 1994 Genocide and Liberia seems to be on the brink of spiraling down into a conflict marked by massacres. Mr. Peterson's book makes you wonder how humanity could sink to the level that it has over and over again, but make no mistake, the conflicts in this book devoured women and children as quickly as male combatants. Even the definition of a combatant is blurry in a world where 10 year olds are trained as shock troops. Famine is used as a weapon as the countryside is deliberately ransacked by warlords. Disease and starvation soon join the fray. The scale of the violence becomes unreal. In Rwanda approximately 800,000 people were exterminated in few months. Mostly with machetes and clubs, not machineguns or gas chambers. It is hard to comprehend the personal face to face orgy of destruction that lead time and time again to children being grouped together and beaten to death.
This book raises questions about the usefulness of food aid to refugees as it is hijacked by combatants and refugees are forced to move around to allow "combat units" access to the food that the world ships in. It would seem that the meddling of the world isn't helping the larger geo-political situation in these countries and indeed that the only real solution will have to be an African solution as the citizens in these war torn countries decide that peace is worth more than war.
Sobering and thought-provoking August 8, 2002
7 out of 10 found this review helpful
In "Me Against My Brother," Scott Peterson tells a terrifingly too-real tale of three ravaged African countries. On its surface, "Me Against My Brother" concerns the events in the war-torn countries of Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda. Familiar concepts like war, genocide, and famine are prominently discussed, but they are really just a backdrop for the true story. For all the talk of battles, massacres, and starvation, "Me Against My Brother" really tells a very human story about the ethical failings of people. At its heart, the book examines the culpability for the horrific events it describes, and finds plenty of people to blame, Americans included. Ultimately, the issues discussed in this book are not just African issues, but universal ones.
The first segment of the book, covering events in Somalia, mainly addresses the failures of US and UN peacekeeping missions (tellingly, Peterson frequently puts the words "Peacekeeping" and "Peacekeepers" in quotation marks). Peterson describes how what was supposed to be a simple mission to keep the peace and alleviate a famine turned into an all-out mission on the part of the US and UN to catch warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, whatever the price. Quickly, and without a clear-cut reason, the US and UN forces conducted a bungling military campaign that resulted in the deaths of countless innocent Somalis, foreign press, and 18 American servicemen in the firefight immortalized in "Black Hawk Down." Through the examination of the ridiculously excessive and unncessary measures taken by forces who were allegedly to keep peace, Peterson provides a glimpse into the reasons for anti-American sentiment that seems chillingly relevant in these times.
The section on Sudan focuses mainly on the endless cycle of violence between the Muslim north and Christian south. Peterson tells of how certain hardline factions in the north hijacked the political process and used religion to justify a never-ending war (this should sound familiar to anyone who reads headlines). The relentless cycle of violence and the tales of unthinkable suffering that come from it only serve to underline the utter pointlessness of the conflict. As the book says, the war has now become an end unto itself; people live solely for the war and know no other way of life.
The concluding section on Rwanda concerns itself mainly with the 1994 genocide in which as many as 1 million Tutsis were massacred by the Hutu majority, often with nothing more than clubs and machetes. Perhaps even more depressing than the genocide, however, are the stories of the American politicians who skirted the obligation to act by playing word games in order to avoid using the word "genocide." Ultimately, though, the story of Rwanda turns into a rumination on the very nature of evil. So many Hutus were involved in the killing, often butchering women and children by hand, that one can only conclude that there are a great deal of people capable of perpretating such atrocities under similar circumstances. The tales of the Rwandan genocide force us to confront the fact that a similar dark side lies in most, and perhaps all, people. As British doctor Ian Palmer says in the book's final chapter, the genocide exposed the dark side that we are all afraid to see, and Rwanda is within every one of us.
All in all, "Me Against My Brother" is a terrific and illuminating book. Peterson deserves to be commended for providing an unflinching potrait of events in Africa during the 1990's. The issues discussed here can be applied to pretty much any conflict, though, because they're part of what it means to be human. If more people would think seriously about the events described here, then perhaps such tragedies could be prevented in the future.
This book is not just about Rwanda, it is about extremes. June 29, 2002
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
My humanitarian medical trip this year to Rwanda mandated that I attempt to understand the insanity of the genocide that killed, in 100 days, over one million children, women and men only eight years ago. My first read was the excellent, and highly recommended book: `We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families' by Philip Gourvitch (1998). My second read was this book, also stellar. This book is not just about Rwanda, it is about extremes; it is about Africa. This is about unbelievable agony, suffering and human catastrophe. `This is not a pretty' book. Scott Peterson has done a outstanding job in duct-taping a handle on a tragedy that is uncircumscribible. The degree of evil to be encountered in this book is extraordinary. This is a book about degenerate crimes against humanity and how people come to commit such atrocities. Peterson divides the book into three parts: Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda; with Somalia get the lion's share. Sudan comes next and finally, Rwanda (about 70 pages of the 320 paged book). Peterson seeks "to illuminate human tragedy in a way that show how such tragedies may be easier to avoided in Africa, and beyond, in the future." Whether he accomplisha this is your judgement call. As a cynic, I believe that what has been, will be again, and `history will repeat itself' sooner that we think or want. He breaks down Rwanda's genocide into three primary axioms: 1) Hutu's hatred and fear of the Tutsi's, 2) Catholic Church's' silent support and active disengagement, and finally, 3) the French government's active support before and during the genocide. However clean and persuasive these arguments are they fail to explain the social insanity and the demonic deprivation that took possession of the Hutu population and drove them into a such an unholy orgy of defilement and slaughter. I cannot fault Peterson for failing short of a succinct, logical, sane explanation of such insanity. No one has, nor do I believe ever will, sufficiently explain the "Why" something this insane happens. Notwithstanding, this is a solid, informative work worthy of any library concerned with such matters. Highly recommended..
Great insight, Great read, Great Book May 31, 2002
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Me against my brother provides the reader with not only an understanding of the conflicts in Somalia, Sudan, and Rwanda, but it is also a personal tale of the author's experiences in Africa. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Africa or international relations. The descriptions are often depressing and heartwrenching, but it instills in the reader that the developed world must do more to help ease the suffering in Africa.
 The Dark side of humanity on the Dark May 14, 2002
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Scott Peterson has written a first hand reporter's account of his experiences in Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda. It is a compelling read for all interested in war, ethnic conflict, genocide and international relations. If you are interested in only one of the three debacles, the book is broken into three sections that make it easy to focus on, say, Sudan, and ignore the other two. Finally, the book includes three maps, one of each region, that are helpful in reading the text.The most detailed section (fully half the book) focuses on Somalia. Other books and monographs have given a good view of the difficulties of United Nations mandated versus authorized Peace Operations, and of the tactical details of various battles (Mark Bowden's "Blackhawk Down.") The advantage of Peterson's work is that it is fresh, almost unedited, and thus a grisly look at war, tribalism, ethnic conflict, scarce resource competition and the inability of international will to alter these stark realities. The last chapter "Back to Zero" is a damning indictment of President Clinton his foreign policy, especially Presidential Decision Directive 25. The most salient lesson in all the revealed savagery of Somalia, though, is in the story of British Colonel "Somali" Smith-after a camel-seizing raid in 1947, he left the country for several years. When he returned in 1967, he was stabbed to death the day after his arrival by the son of one of the men killed in the 1947 raid. It seems Somalis DO bear a grudge a long time-regardless of where the problem originated, Americans would do well to remember this before returning to Mogadishu. The second part of the book tries in some detail to come to grips with the endless bloodletting of Sudan's civil war between (alleged) Christians and Muslims. This section is not as well written as the first, and the reader begins to tire of one dusty corpse and massacre after another, but Peterson makes his point. The would be "solver" of this religious quagmire, fueled by poverty and generational cycles of violence, will have untied a modern Gordian Knot. Peterson gives a quick overview of the history of Sudan, the tides of fortune sweeping back and forth, raiding for slaves, attacking Sufism, a mystical sub sect of Islam, and always, always fighting for control of the Nile. In some ways, then, nothing has changed, only the technologies for spreading propaganda and death. A new twist to which Peterson pays particular attention, and wrestles with well, is the dilemma of aid organizations. If you are providing aid that "others may live" many of them shall live to fight, and either live some more, or die at the hands of others. Second, your very aid shall become a resource worth fighting over, so your provision of sustenance is actually an incentive TO fight, rather than not. The last part of the book focuses on the carnage of Rwanda. Peterson jumps into the fray of whether or not a "Peace Operations force" could have averted the carnage, or at least slowed it down. Peterson sides with Monsieur Prunier, a French scholar who believes that as few as 20 armored vehicles would have made the difference. I think this understates the calculated assault, led by a military sometimes called "the Prussians of Africa." I think it would have taken tens of thousands of soldiers, with helicopters and fixed wing transports, lots of communications gear and fierce political resolve to staunch the flow of blood here. All in all, a good "raw" book, well worth the read, but by no means a definitive scholarly work on the central African swamp of the last 20 years.
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