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Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
Penguin
February 2008
On Sale: February 18, 2008
640 pages
ISBN: 1594201285
EAN: 9781594201288
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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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