Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
by Samantha Power
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Book Summary Information
Author: Samantha PowerEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-02-14
ISBN: 1594201285
Number of pages: 640
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Book Reviews of Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
Book Review: A Masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
The book is about Sergio Vieira de Mello, a servant of the United Nations, a zealot of human rights, and a man who fought to save the world. Sergio was one of the most brilliant diplomats of the time, and many were waiting for his appointment as the Secretary-General of the United Nations - a wish which would never realize because Vieira de Mello was killed by a bomb in his Iraqi mission in 2003. His noble path is described in the book.
Sergio was a great diplomat; he could negotiate and compromise on an unprecedented level. Apart from being indispensable for his missions and loved by his colleagues, Sergio managed to charm dictators, war criminals, and influential leaders; he was the only man in the United Nations who charmed George W. Bush. Vieira de Mello did not judge, neither did he blame the past; he looked to solve the problem. Due to his remarkable diplomatic skills, he solved crises in Lebanon, Cambodia, Bosnia, East Timor, Iraq, among many others. He was appointed as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2002 and was nearing the appointment of the Sec-Gen in 2003, when his life was tragically lost.
Sergio was a man of high moral principles, who respected the United Nations above all. Impartiality of the United Nations was another rule of his work; prestige and dignity of the UN were his highest priority. Sergio carried the UN charter in his pocket all his life and cited the Resolutions of the Security Council by heart. His last words were "Don't pull out," relating to the UN Iraqi mission. Those words were said when he was buried below the rubbish after the explosion in the UN Iraqi office.
Ultimately, the book shows what the United Nations could be. I was as lucky as to read the draft chapters of the unpublished book in the class of Samantha Power two years ago; the class was called "Does the UN matter?" Vieira de Mello gave the answer to that question with his life and even more so with his death. The United Nations deserves respect and influence - especially due to leaders like Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Summary of Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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 MelloIf 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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