Acts of astonishing generosity

He’s jostled awake, a day later, by a Hutu woman about his mother’s age. She pulls Deo from the brush, discovers he’s a Tutsi and then, at extraordinary risk, saves him from beheading by telling Hutu guards that he’s her son. The scene suggests how, in the face of nightmares born of surface distinctions — of power exercising all of its destructive prerogatives — the seeds of mankind’s survival lie in the unexpected acts of kinship and kindness.

-- from Ron Suskind's review of Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder