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Hélène Dumas (Author) Hélène Dumas is a research fellow in history at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), affiliated with the Raymond Aron Center for sociological and political studies at the EHESS, Paris. She is the author of Le Génocide au village: Le massacre des Tutsi au Rwanda. Louisa Lombard (Foreword By) Louisa Lombard is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. She is the author of State of Rebellion: Violence and Intervention in the Central African Republic. Catherine Porter (Translator) Catherine Porter is Professor of French Emerita at the State University of New York at Cortland and former president of the Modern Language Association. She has translated more than fifty books, including Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth and Elisabeth Roudinesco’s The Sovereign Self.
Beyond Despair is shattering. The book constitutes a restrained, low-pitched, and controlled exposition. Dumas's restraint comes from profound empathy and understanding of an event that is unbearable to contemplate. The story--of human evil--bursts out from these children's lives and overwhelms us. I can't recall a reading a book in ten or twenty years that has affected me so deeply.---Jan T. Gross, Princeton University It is a testament to Hélène Dumas's integrity as a historian that she does not instrumentalize, and thereby distort, the children's accounts on behalf of her own grand take-away. Instead she fills in the elements of the scenes that the children leave out, and explains the common themes, so that the full force of the children's experiences hits readers all the harder, and more directly.---Louisa Lombard, from the Foreword
