This is the second 600 plus page book that BuzzFlash is offering by Samantha Power, the now former advisor to Barack Obama. Her departure after the printing of an off-the-record remark is a big loss to us all should Obama become the candidate. That is because she is a brilliant analyst of what it takes to broker peace in the midst of horrible alternatives.

She's a remarkable person: journalist, lawyer, conflict resolution specialist, professor.

The ill-fated remark about Senator Clinton occurred while Power was on a tour in England for this book, "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World." It's about the legendary U.N. peacekeeper who was killed in a suicide bombing not long into the Iraq occupation.

This week she discussed the book on the Colbert Report.

Description from Penguin Press:

From Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, an epic tale-part thriller, part tragedy-for our age, the political career and tragic death of the incomparable humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello

If there is a single individual who can be said to have been at center stage through all of the most significant humanitarian and geopolitical crises of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, it was Sergio Vieira de Mello. Vieira de Mello was born in 1948 just as the post-World War II order was taking shape. He died in a terrorist attack on UN Headquarters in Iraq in 2003 as the battle lines in the twenty-first-century's first great power struggle were being drawn. In nearly four decades of work for the United Nations, Sergio distinguished himself as the consummate humanitarian, able to negotiate with-and often charm-cold war military dictators, Marxist jungle radicals, reckless warlords, and nationalist and sectarian militia leaders. By taking the measure of this remarkable man's life and career, Power offers a fascinating answer to the question: Who possesses the moral authority, the political sense, and the military and economic heft to protect human life and bring peace to the unruly new world order?

Chasing the Flame brings us deep into the thorniest, least well-understood episodes of recent world history-the conflagration in the Middle East, through Vieira de Mello's troubleshooting in Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel's 1982invasion; the clean-up of the cold war's residue, through Vieira de Mello's taming of the Khmer Rouge and his repatriation of four-hundred-thousand Cambodian refugees in the early nineties; the explosion of sectarian and ethnic militancy, through his efforts to negotiate an end to the slaughter in Bosnia; the struggle to nation-build in war-torn societies, through his quasi-colonial governorships of Kosovo and East Timor; and the engulfing of Iraq in civil war and terror, through his tragic final posting as the UN representative in Baghdad, where he became the victim of the country's first-ever suicide bomb.

Readers of Chasing the Flame will recognize the particular mixture of deep reporting and incisive analysis that Power uses to imbue Sergio's life with significance, and lessons, for our own. In this exquisitely reasoned and imagined book, Samantha Power reveals Sergio Vieira de Mello's powerful legacy of humanity and ideological strength in an age sorely in need of both.


"Samantha Power has mined the tragic 2003 death of UN High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello in Iraq to tell an even bigger story. For three decades Vieira de Mello courageously embodied the oft-maligned and seemingly hopeless UN mission to bring kindness, sanity, and peace to a cruel and war-torn world. He ultimately was martyred to it, struggling to salvage order out of the mess the US invasion had made in Iraq. In this captivating life story, the charming Brazilian internationalist emerges as a wry, Scotch-loving, womanizing philosopher, a kind of secular saint who wedded his considerable personal ambition to the best hopes of mankind. It is a stirring portrait of courage and tenaciously pragmatic idealism."—Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah and national correspondent for The Atlantic

"The best way to understand today's messy world is to appreciate the inspiring life and diplomatic genius of Vieira de Mello. Samantha Powers has done a brilliant job. This is a compelling biography of a fascinating man but also more: through his life and tragic death we get a better feel for how to deal with the challenges of religious extremism, refugees, terrorism, and ethnic struggle. If only he were still alive! Read this book and weep, read it and understand, read it and cheer."—Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Einstein: His Life and Universe

“Pulitzer Prize-winner Power draws on more than 400 interviews to offer this detailed portrait of charismatic Sergio Vieira de Mello…riveting and heart-breaking. A well-rendered account of one of the UN’s best.” —Kirkus Reviews
“This majestic, profoundly important book should reach the widest possible audience. As a biography of an endlessly fascinating man, it is beautifully written, enthralling from start to finish. As a study of leadership, it ranks with the very best. As an analysis of how to respond to the struggles of the new era in which we find ourselves, it is the defining work for our generation.”

-—Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals

“This book fascinates, both because of its subject, Sergio Vieira De Mello, the urbane U.N. troubleshooter who was regarded by many as the Secretary-General-In-Waiting, and because of the infinite complexity of the issues Vieira De Mello faced in places like Lebanon, Kosovo and Iraq, where he ultimately met his death. Samantha Power has engaged in a work of vivid reportage.”

-—Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent

About the author:

Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy Practice at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a foreign policy columnist at Time magazine. In 2003, her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy.