Your review of Jason Stearns’ Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War in Africa (New York: Public Affairs, 2011) is a sobering read (“Chronicle of Death Ignored,” April 30, 2011). “Over the past fifteen years, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo has consumed as many as five-million lives,” you point out. “And yet, who can name the man responsible?” I wonder. Mobutu and the two Kabilas are mentioned many times over, but the war, which was triggered by genocide in Rwanda in 1994, is still a mystery. What makes the book valuable, though, is a collection of anecdotes about encounters with the participants, such as men who routinely killed with their own hands a hundred people a day. As well as encounters with the victims, among whom are half-a-million women raped. To be a bit more straightforward, what makes the book valuable is an account of our own species’ savagery. According to you, Stearns refuses to fall back on “easy answers” like those of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” (1899). But wonton human savagery is the only answer to the riddle. And we all come from Africa. Returning to your question, the man responsible is, well, man himself. Easy or not, this answer must not be swept under the rug.