Leora Kahn

In one of the few brief comments included in this grim collection of photographs, Nicholas D. Kristof, the New York Times reporter who has done so much to draw world attention to the atrocities being committed in Sudan, writes:

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of Darfur isn't that gunmen on the Sudanese payroll heave babies into bonfires as they shout epithets against blacks. It's that the rest of us are responding only with averted eyes and polite tut-tutting.

This book, with photographic contributions from eight world-renowned photojournalists, is meant to refocus that gaze, to force us to bear witness to a terrible and painful reality. It is a work meant to stir our outrage and compassion, and to rouse us to action. Proceeds from sales go to Amnesty International and The Genocide Intervention Network, so it is also a book intended to raise money for a most worthy cause...

This is not the place to look for an introduction to the subject, as it provides only the most elementary outline of the progression of events which led to the current human catastrophe. No, this slender volume is more intimate - it sucks the reader/viewer into the real human suffering behind the sound-bite news headlines. Utterly heartbreaking.… (altro)