Shake Hands with the Devil
by Roméo Dallaire
A first-person account of command under collapse — and what indifference actually costs.
- Status
- Read · October 2021
- Bought
- October 18, 2021
- For
- Anyone who carries operational responsibility · Readers of military and political memoir · People who want to understand the Rwandan genocide firsthand
The one-paragraph verdict
Dallaire commanded the UN force in Rwanda in 1994 and watched the world decide the genocide was not worth stopping. The book’s power is its proximity: the cables he sent, the warnings ignored, the procedural machinery that kept grinding while people were killed. It is also, honestly, a slog in places — 500-plus pages thick with troop movements, acronyms, and UN bureaucracy that test your patience before the next gut-punch arrives. That density is the point and the flaw at once: it earns its authority but does not respect your time. Read it anyway.
Who should read it
Anyone who has been handed a mandate without the means to fulfill it will recognize the specific helplessness here. It is essential for readers of the Rwandan genocide and for people who study how institutions fail in slow motion. If you want a tight narrative history rather than a commander’s raw, exhausting first-person ledger, this is not your book — start elsewhere.
Where it earned its place
This is on my off-duty shelf — no platform tie-in, no clean lesson to port into a runbook. What it left me with is a sharper sense of moral weight: the difference between following process and being responsible for an outcome. That distinction outlasts any one job.
Skip it if…
Skip it if you are looking for a fast read, a hopeful one, or a sanitized one. It is long, it is heavy, and it does not let you off the hook — which is exactly why it matters.
[Shake Hands with the Devil on Goodreads]