Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World
by Samantha Power
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Book Summary Information
Author: Samantha PowerEdition: Paperback
Format: Bargain Price
Published: 2008-12-02
ISBN: N/A
Number of pages: 640
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Book Reviews of Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World
Book Review: read this book.....
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is highly recommended, to anyone with an interest in international affairs. Its a tremendous work of research on Power's part to convey so much detail of de Mello's life and achievements, in some cases of operations / conversations dating from more than two decades past. The style is uber accessible, exactly right for the subject, and indeed reads like a 500+ page New Yorker article, unsurprisingly given Power's journalistic background and that (possibly) the first public outing of some of this material was in an article in that magazine in January 2008 ("The Envoy").
There is a sadness that envelops the book, of course, which is that everyone knows the denouement before picking it up for the first time, making it both a study of leadership and achievement, and also of tragically wasted opportunity. We are left wondering not just whether he would have been Secretary General one day, but what kind of Secretary General would he have made? Would he have carried on trying to avoid making enemies? Where would that have taken him? Would he have made a better one than Annan, who to me ends the book still slightly inaccessible, ephemeral, as if he didn't really make himself or his insights available to Power, or couldn't bear to, even now.
The other source of sadness of course comes from his life being cut short with so many important loose ends unsecured. The absence of goodbyes, the strong sense of it being the wrong woman on the Brazilian air force jet, there being no shoulder being colder than the one of the UN bureaucracy, that only flew his partner Larriera as far as Buenos Aires because thats what the rules allowed. A final poignant image of Larriera and de Mello's mother celebrating the end of Annan's tenure with a bottle of champagne, something a reader feels the de Mello of the previous 500 pages would never have wanted to see in a million years, and proof of the mess that violent and sudden death can trail in its wake.
Its an important study on many levels, not least because humanitarianism has always been about leadership. From Dunant onwards, its a story of exceptional individuals achieving exceptional things in the face of exceptional adversity, even other people's. The world's tragedy is that there aren't enough de Mello's, and they don't come around often enough. For every de Mello or Jan Egeland, there seems to come along a Kenzo Oshima or a John Holmes, well-motivated and ultimately invisible, into whose well-intentioned blandness the world's conscience is allowed to hide.
And if you need a new hero, look no further than Gil Loescher, the sole survivor who was in de Mello's office at the time of the blast, and the "tutorials about resilience" that he talks of having derived from the refugees to which he has devoted his career. May your "second life" be a beautiful, a long and a productive one, good sir.
Summary of Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World
In this perfect match of author and subject, Pulitzer Prize?winner Samantha Power tackles the life of Sergio Vieira de Mello, whose work for the U.N. before his 2003 death in Iraq was emblematic of moral struggle on the global stage. Power has drawn on a staggering breadth of research (including 400 interviews) to show us a heroic figure and the conflicts he waded into, from Cambodia?s Khmer Rouge to the slaughter in Bosnia to the war-torn Middle East. The result is a peerless portrait of humanity and pragmatism, as well as a history of our convulsive age.Political Books
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