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Loading... Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the Worldby Samantha Power
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Fascinating. (  )jwilder | Nov 9, 2008 |   Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil (simply "Sergio" to many) was the personification of what the United Nations could and should be. As Paul Bremer's adviser Ryan Cocker once said, "Sergio is as good as it gets not only for the UN, but for international diplomacy." Sergio was the UN Secretary Generals "ultimate go-to guy", a nation builder in the world's toughest spots like East Timor, Cambodia, Kosovo. No one who met him - from George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq War, to the Khmer Rouge, to Slobodan Milosevic - came away untouched by his intelligence, physical bearing, charisma and integrity. It was a major blow to the world when he and 14 other UN staff were killed on August 19th 2003 by an al-Qeada suicide bomber at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, an event that has become known as the UN's "9/11". He was often spoken of as candidate for the position of UN Secretary General, but his career was cut short before he had a chance to become the world-renowned elder statesman he was destined to be. This biography by Pulitzer Prize winning Samantha Power is a monument to his legacy and should connect with a wide audience. Not only an enthralling story of adventure (Sergio was almost always in the field in dangerous situations and places), but equally a revelation of what was happening behind the headlines in major crisis around the world over the past 30 years - and it is the story of the UN itself, as mirrored in the ups and downs of Sergio's life and character, its faults, weaknesses and strengths. Power has managed to convey Sergio's persona with utmost sympathy, seductively drawing the reader into Sergio's world. His younger staff members were often likened to puppy dogs who followed him around, at one point even into the bushes to take a leak - I often felt this way reading his biography, like a puppy dog I didn't want him to leave or for the book to end, for the inevitable to happen. I dreaded the last chapter titled "August 19 2003" - it is the most thrilling chapter in the book, a masterpiece of journalistic writing - it can bring the reader to tears in a way no fiction could achieve. Samantha Power is an adviser to Barak Obama "the person whose rigor and compassion bear the closest resemblance to Sergio's that I have ever seen," she says in the credits. Power also knows Terry George, director of Hotel Rwanda, who advised her on this book and who expressed an interesting in making a movie version, we can only hope. --Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd (  )Stbalbach | Feb 18, 2008 | 0.010 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0007172990, Paperback)During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research, she discovered a pattern: "The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred," she writes in this impressive book. Debunking the notion that U.S. leaders were unaware of the horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century, Power discusses how much was known and when, and argues that much human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort by the U.S. She does not claim that the U.S. alone could have prevented such horrors, but does make a convincing case that even a modest effort would have had significant impact. Based on declassified information, private papers, and interviews with more than 300 American policymakers, Power makes it clear that a lack of political will was the most significant factor for this failure to intervene. Some courageous U.S. leaders did work to combat and call attention to ethnic cleansing as it occurred, but the vast majority of politicians and diplomats ignored the issue, as did the American public, leading Power to note that "no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on." This powerful book is a call to make such indifference a thing of the past. --Shawn Carkonen(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:23 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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