Book description
Sergio Vieira de Mello-a humanitarian, peacemaker and state builder
-was at centre of the most significant geopolitical crises of the last
half-century. 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
polarizing struggle were being drawn.
This is a dual biography: the story of a man who never stopped
learning and the biography of a perilous world whose ills are too big
to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Even as Vieira
de Mello arranged food deliveries, organized refugee returns, or
negotiated with warlords, he pressed his colleagues to join him in
grappling with such questions as: When should killers be engaged and
when should they be shunned? When is military force justified? How can
outsiders play a role in healing broken people and broken places? He
did not have the luxury of simply posing these questions; he had to
find answers, apply them, and live with the consequences.
Samantha Power is Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global
Leadership and Public Policy Practice at Harvard University's School of
Government. Her book, "
A Problem from Hell
":
America and the Age of Genocide
(2003), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction, the
National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction, the J.
Anthony Lukas Book Prize and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur
Ross Prize for the best book in U. S. foreign policy. Power is also the
recipient of two National Magazine Awards.
