David Rieff - A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in an Age of Genocide (A Vintage original)

Praise for A Bed for the Night :

[Rieff] discovered the far-too-little-reported world of international people of conscience, risking their lives every day for the worlds unfortunate, and became their singular witness and critic. This is their story and moral dilemma, aggressively told: a brave analysis.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

A startling wake-up call of a book, sure to spark arguments.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

An important and timely book.... Rieffs uncompromising conclusion will divide readers accustomed to the valedictory gesture of optimism typical in this type of book. But there is no doubting the urgency and import of Rieffs work, whose tone of unconsoling clarity hammers his point home like a shattered dream.

Jason Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle

A deeply urgent and provocative book.

The New Republic

A painful, urgent, and penetrating discussion of a crisis most of us didnt even know existed and yet which cuts to the heart of the Wests role in some of the most violent world events of the past decade.... Passionate, eloquent.

Publishers Weekly (starred)

A deeply engaging denunciation of current perspectives on humanitarian aid that should be read by anyone concerned with global welfare.... Passionate and articulate.... Trenchant political analysis.... A good read, too.

New York Law Journal

A Bed for the Night breaks more new ground than anything previously written by Rieff.... Until Rieff came along, it was easy to think of aid workers as politically neutral, beset-upon saints, cleaning wounds and dispensing nutrition as a last hope. Post-Rieff, it is no longer possible to live with that formulation.... Every reader who cares about the possibility of an improved lot for residents of every nation should explore Rieffs thinking.

The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

A sober treatise, burning with righteous indignation. Rieff makes a solid if impious case for humanitarian reform, one that ought to generate much discussion.

Kirkus Reviews

An opinionated, provocative dissent from consensus views.

Library Journal

Rieff takes a clear-eyed look at the limits of humanitarianism. He deals with battlefields that he has traversed himself; as a frontline reporter he has been to Africa, the Balkans, and Afghanistan. His challenging thesis is that, by aiming too high, governments, NGOs, the UN family of organizations, and relief organizations are doing less good rather than more. It is a book both beautifully written and deeply felt.

David Fromkin, author of Kosovo Crossing

Though I disagree with a lot of David Rieffs judgments about humanitarian relief and humanitarian wars, his brilliant screed is just what we need to get a serious debate going on this very serious subject.

Leslie Gelb, former President, Council on Foreign Relations

A wake-up, shake-up for those of us who see unquestionable humanitarianism as the disinterested answer to conflict and poverty in our millennium world. David Rieff, not looking on from afar, but a witness within the killing fields of Europe, Africa, Asia, has written an absolutely essential book. While I disagree with some of his conclusions, his overall argument cannot be ignored by any honest person. An achievement of profound intelligence and courage of conviction.

Nadine Gordimer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1991

Nearly every sentence provokes an argument. Agree or disagree with Rieff, anyone seriously concerned with the armed conflicts of our time, from Bosnia and Kosovo to Rwanda and Afghanistan, should grapple with the difficult issues he raises. A book with moral gravitas.

Aryeh Neier, President, Open Society Institute, and author of War Crimes

David Rieffs clear-eyed and deeply pessimistic assessment of the humanitarian state of the world is based on his own direct observation of its worst disaster areas. I do not agree with all of Rieffs judgements, but this heartrendingly frank book provides a good starting point for rethinking the relatively new vocation of humanitarianism. It also provides an excellent antidote to the hollow cliches and generalizations that often blur and distort the horribly real problems of helping the worlds most afflicted people.

Brian Urquhart, former Undersecretary General of the United Nations

A profound and graceful meditation on the uses and limitations of the humanitarian impulse.

Amy Wilentz, author of Martyrs Crossing

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This book is for Alice Mayhew

Every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism.

Walter Benjamin

A BED FOR THE NIGHT

I hear that in New York

At the corner of 26th Street and Broadway

A man stands every evening during the winter months

And gets beds for the homeless there

By appealing to passers-by.

It wont change the world

It wont improve relations among men

It will not shorten the age of exploitation

But a few men have a bed for the night

For a night the wind is kept from them

The snow meant for them falls on the roadway.

Dont put down the book on reading this, man.

A few people have a bed for the night

For a night the wind is kept from them

The snow meant for them falls on the roadway

But it wont change the world

It wont improve relations among men

It will not shorten the age of exploitation.

Bertolt Brecht

Translated by George Rapp

T HIS BOOK WAS BEGUN IN 1995 in Sarajevo, while the siege was still going on and the snipers were working as diligently as ever, blowing peoples heads and limbs off in the streets of the Bosnian capital. It was concluded in the fall of 2001, as the ruins of the World Trade Center continued to smolder, and as New Yorkers, of whom I am one, but of course not only New Yorkers, dazedly mourned their dead and wondered about their future. In other words, it is a book begun in despair and completed... well, in whatever state of mind that lies beyond despair.

I make no apologies for this. It should go without saying, but probably doesnt in an era that no longer can distinguish between cynicism and pessimism, that I hope this book will make some small contribution to awakening conscience about the wars, famines, and refugee crises that are its theme, and not make people more cynical or more resigned. But I will not deny that I see little if any empirical basis for optimism. When I titled an earlier book on Bosnia Slaughterhouse, I dont think I knew how apt a description it was of such a wide swath of the world. An eighteenth-century French aphorist said that one would have to swallow a live toad at breakfast to be sure of not encountering something more disgusting in the course of the day. Looking back, I often think that is what I have been doing over the course of the past decadedeliberately gulping down one live toad after another. To put it less histrionically, between the time I first set foot in northern Bosnia in the late summer of 1992, and followed far braver colleagues like Ed Vulliamy and Roy Gutman into the Serb concentration camps of the Bosanska Krajina, and the night I lingered near the bottom of the six-story mound of rubble that had been the World Trade Center, watching as dust that included pulverized human beings as well as pulverized steel covered my boots, I have, at what cost I do not yet know and for reasons I doubt I will ever fully understand, done my best to rub my own nose in the horror of the world.