Chasing the Flame
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World Samantha Power,
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
ISBN: 1594201285
DDC: 341.48092
Edition: Hardcover; 2008-02-14
Summary:
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.
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