BuzzFlash Reviews
Samantha Power's "Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World "(Hardcover)
Samantha Power
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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.
Excerpts from an interview with Samantha Power by Penguin Press:
Q. What made you decide to write about Sergio Vieira de Mello?
A. In my travels in the United States and abroad in the last few years, I have found people hungering for insights on how their governments should respond to global challenges like terrorism, civil war, genocide, and extreme poverty. They believe that their fates are linked to those of others around the world, but they are overwhelmed—and sometimes paralyzed—by the messiness of what confronts them in the newspaper every morning. Sergio, whom I knew in Bosnia, seemed the one global figure who had the experience, the charm, and the hard-won wisdom both to sustain public interest and to offer guidance on how to manage broken people and broken places. Since he began traveling to violent places at a young age with no experience, but evolved into one of the most trusted diplomats and trouble-shooters in the world, I thought maybe my readers could learn as he learned. He had a thirty-five year head start asking very difficult questions, but this gave him the capacity to perhaps spare us from making his mistakes.
Q. A Problem from Hell, your first book, won a Pulitzer Prize, among others, and garnered much critical acclaim. How has that changed things for you?
A. I have enjoyed such a personal connection to the readers of A Problem from Hell that for a long time I was afraid I would inevitably disappoint them with whatever I wrote next. Young people in particular were so intensely determined to apply the lessons of A Problem from Hell that I also felt guilty that I wasn’t working with them every single day to build the powerful, anti-genocide constituency that is needed. So initially, I guess the critical success of my last book gave me anxiety that I wouldn’t contribute anything so meaningful again and guilt that I wasn’t helping lead the charge to change governmental responses to mass atrocity.
At some point along the way, though, I got out of my head and focused on doing justice to Sergio’s incredible story. I realized that, if the book could capture the lessons of his life, it could assist those doing anti-genocide work, while also possibly introducing a whole new group of readers to the kinds of shifts in our thinking and in our policies that will be needed to make the planet more safe and stable.
Q. Sergio Vieira de Mello’s career with the United Nations spanned almost thirty-five years. Although Chasing the Flame offers a richly detailed look at Vieira de Mello’s entire career, the last third of the book is devoted solely to the year or so that preceded his death. Why did you decide to dedicate so much of your work to this relatively brief period?
A. Since Iraq was the last mission of Sergio’s life, it was the place where he probably had the most insight to offer. By the time he landed in Baghdad in 2003, he had worked in a dozen conflict or post-conflict situations—Bangladesh, Sudan, Cyprus, Mozambique, Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and East Timor. Yet because Paul Bremer’s U.S.-led Coalition (and not the UN) was governing Iraq at the time of his deployment, Sergio had almost no formal power. While he offered the UN’s help in planning elections, training police, establishing an independent judiciary, settling property disputes, facilitating refugee returns, and reintegrating Iraqi army officers into society, Bremer and the Bush administration took very little of his advice.
Iraq is perhaps the greatest strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy. It is a war whose strategic, economic, and human consequences will be felt for decades. I felt that the least we could do at this stage is learn absolutely everything we could about what might have been done differently not for the sake of re-litigating the past but for the sake of applying the lessons Sergio had to offer to future conflict areas.
Q. You knew Vieira de Mello personally, though you tell his story principally through the accounts of those who worked with him more closely. Did your personal knowledge of Vieira de Mello complicate or facilitate your task as his biographer?
A. Honestly, the man I now know7mdash;after 4 years and some 400 interviews with people on just about every continent on the globe—bears very little resemblance to the man I thought I knew in the Balkans in the 1990s. They had some of the same qualities certainly: razor-sharp wit, a seemingly genuine regard for individuals (as distinct from abstract “human rights”), intense professional ambition, great personal courage, and widely-hailed negotiating gifts. But the Sergio I now know had a vastly more varied background than I understood (he would never have mentioned he had not one but two doctorates from the Sorbonne); he was more self-critical than I would have imagined; he was more capable of conducting in-depth policy analysis on the fly than I would have thought any crisis-manager capable; he was more conscientious than I thought (I would not have dreamed he would maintain contacts with his drivers and house-cleaners years after his missions); and in the end he was probably also lonelier and more insecure than he let on (having played up his love for women his whole life, it was only at the end of his life that he began to confess his fears—of aging, of dying, of being alone).
Q. Chasing the Flame—can you explain the significance of the title?
A. The title has two meanings for me. First, in his professional choices, Sergio was like a moth to the flame of war. He hungered to be wherever he could find “the action.” Some people considered him a “cowboy.” Others might have labeled him an “adrenalin junkie” or a “war junkie.” I don’t think these labels do him justice. He certainly got a charge out of being in places where the stakes were high. He was fascinated by evil-doers like the Khmer Rouge or the Rwandan genocidaires. And he did not hesitate to take personal risks if he felt his presence would make a difference (e.g., the Cambodian jungle, the Bosnian safe area of Gorazde, or Baghdad itself). But I think his desire to work amid the flames—on the most pressing humanitarian challenges of our time—testified to a belief (and, by the end of his life, a frustration) that he was the best man for the job, and that he stood higher odds of negotiating humanitarian access, resolving border disputes, mollifying tempers, etc. than any one else.
Second, Sergio was an idealist. He was a Machiavellian idealist, sometimes prepared to use ruthless tactics to pursue what he thought were noble ends, but he was, still, an idealist. Not long before he deployed to Iraq, when he was working as UN Human Rights Commissioner in Geneva, Sergio told Philip Gourevitch of the New Yorker that UN office jobs had an unfortunate knack for “killing the flame” of idealism that burned bright in those aspired to be in public service. That flame burned in Sergio from the time he was a young man riding his bicycle through the streets of Rio de Janeiro during the military coup of 1964. It burned in him in Paris during the student riots of 1968. It burned in him when he joined the UN and followed his mentor Thomas Jamieson around like a puppy. And it burned in him when he wrote his doctorates on the importance of creating a philosophy that would motivate human improvement and a democratic peace. The UN Charter contained in it the ideals that Sergio hoped to see states respect and citizens enjoy. But as he got older, while he acquired political savvy and an understanding of how to navigate the system, he did not grow more confident that his ideals would be realized. In that sense, while his life is the embodiment of his deepest beliefs, he died still pursuing, or chasing, the flame.
Q. How many interviews did you do for this book?
A. I conducted around 400 interviews with Sergio’s colleagues, family-members, and friends. I also traveled to many of the places Sergio worked, such as Geneva, Sudan, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor.
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