Paul Rusesabagina, left, and Don Cheadle attend a premieere of Hotel Rwanda on Sunday, November 14, 2004, in New York City.
Paul Hopkins Paul Rusesabagina had humble beginnings; his parents were farmers, growing sorghum and bananas. Although, poor as dirt there was plenty to eat and his childhood was generally a happy one, scarred only by the memory of a massacre during the Hutu Uprising of 1959 when Paul was just five.
Rusesabagina is a Rwanadan, a Hutu, and was the inspiration behind the award-winning movie Hotel Rwanda, directed to critical acclaim by Irishman Terry George in 2004.
For almost all of the 100 days of the Rwanadan genocide of 1994 - when ordinary Hutu peasants massacred their Tutsi neighbours - Rusesabagina gave refuge to almost 1,500 people inside the Hotel Mille Collines, in the capital Kigali, which he managed for the Belgian airline company Sabena.
Most of his 'guests' were Tutsis - at one time the ruling elite of this small central African country and former Belgian colony - but he also sheltered moderate Hutus who had not joined the lemming-like atrocious actions of their neighbours that saw 800,000 men, women and children cut down dead with the simple farming tool of the machete.
It was genocide whatever way you look at it, whatever way you try to rationalise it (it can't be rationalised) but it was ignored by the world - in particular America and the UN 'peace-keeping' force on the ground, who turned a blind eye every time someone raised a machete.
While the dismembered corpses piled higher and higher on this beautiful land of a thousand hills, Paul Rusesabagina played a deadly cat-and-mouse game as he fought desperately to protect his hotel 'guests'.
But his fight was one of words rather than weapons, as he used diplomacy, double-speak, and not a little cunning, to bargain and beg for the lives of those who had sought refuge in his place of work.
The Hotel Mille Collines was the hotel in Kigali, its sumptuousness and opulence being a temporary haven down the years, not only for international visiting dignataries and diplomats but also for the local bigwigs of the army and police, some of whom spent their days drinking by the pool while planning the goading of 'ordinary people' into becoming killing machines.
This manager over the years had kept a black book of anyone who was anyone who had visited the hotel and who he had entertained - often with drinks on the house. Now, as the genocide reached unimaginable levels, Paul Rusesabagina started calling in the favours his generosity had earned him and hit the black book's phone numbers with a vengeance.
When every other day, the murdering mob made to breach the hotel's boundary, he called a general he knew; when they ran out of water, having drunk even the entire swimming pool, he rang a chief of police to allow safe passage of fresh water; when he tried to make good the escape of his own Tutsi wife and four children, he enlisted the aid of the UN commander in Kigali; and when one army intelligence officer, high on dope and drink, gave him 30 minutes to evacuate his guests - to certain death - he again brought out his black book.
Rusesabagina used the hotel's good international standing as his trading tool. Few generals or renegades, mad or otherwise, he argued, would wish to incur the wrath of an international company like Sabena (now, alas bankrupt and gone).
Each call was a delicate, and daring, dalliance that could have gone either way - that meant the difference between his refugees living another day or ending up on the heaped corpses that littered the country.
It is these moments - these terrifying moments - that give the book its excruciating edge. Your eyes literally hang on the pages as you await the fate, time and time again, of Paul Rusesabagina and his guests.
In the end, the Hotel Mille Collines was one of the few places in Rwanda where not one drop of blood was shed. Yet Rusesabagina concludes that he was just a hotel manager doing what a hotel manager does best - looking after his guests. Just a job, maybe, but it saved almost 1,500 lives.
His tale is terrifying, well paced and well told, a shining example of how in the midst of evil the good actions of just one person can - and do - make a difference.
Friends and neighbours and people he had shared many a banana beer with were among the 800,000 annihilated; others he had shared poolside drinks with, those generals and chiefs in his little black book, are behind bars for life for their crime of genocide.
"We may say it must never ever happen again. Hitler's Final Solution was supposed to have been the last expression of this monstrous idea ," he writes, "the final time the world would tolerate a deliberate attempt to exterminate an entire race."
But citing Cambodia, Bosnia, the Kurds and Sudan today, as well as the tearing apart of his beloved Rwanda, he says "genocide remains the most pressing human rights question of the 21st century".
Reading this awesome account, your heart cannot but bleed for man's inhumanity to man - but gladden that sometimes good triumphs over evil: in this case because of the extraordinary courage of an ordinary man.
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