April 23, 1999
Web posted at: 2:49 p.m. EDT (1849 GMT)

(CNN) -- Philip Gourevitch's book "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda" has won the award for best nonfiction book on foreign affairs from the Overseas Press Club of America.

The book, published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, focuses on the 1994 machete massacre of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Tutsis.

"The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust," Gourevitch writes with startling implication. "It was the most efficient mass killings since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

From there, he retraces events of Rwanda's recent horrific past, as the Rwandan government implemented a policy calling for everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority. At least 800,000 people were slaughtered in just 100 days.

Gourevitch, a staff writer at The New Yorker, made his mark with this book, questioning the responsibility of international authorities and the possibility for peace after what may be remembered as the dark continent's darkest moment this century.

"It's not really a book about horror," Gourevitch said last year. "Rwanda's stories are often stories of the most radical wrongheadedness, cruelty and murder, and at the same time there are also the stories of survival and resistance -- stories of the exceptional humanity of people who responded to the worst by exhibiting greatness of soul."

On Friday, Gourevitch was in Los Angeles by invitation, awaiting announcement of the winners of the Los Angeles Times book prizes.

Previously the book won National Book Critics Circle's general nonfiction prize, and it is a nominee for a PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction, to be announced next week.