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Title: Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
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Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
List Price: $32.95
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| Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Penguin Press HC, The A Real Person With Real Leadership | | Samantha Power reveals in this book why she is deserving of a Pulitzer Prize. A humanistic view of a man who was not only a human but also one of the world's greatest humanitarians. Changed my corrupted view of the UN into one of understanding and appreciation. Thank you to Sergio and his family & friends for your dedicated service to humanity. | | Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Penguin Press HC, The A powerful portrait of both a man and a world | About half-way through Chasing the Flame, Sergio Vieira de Mello advises a younger UNHCR official to "be very graphic because that is how you grab people's attention. And our success at UNHCR depends on our ability to get and hold people's attention."
It's a piece of advice that the book's author, Samantha Power, brings to life throughout the book. From the Khmer Rouge shooting at a UN helicopter that was lowering a housing container into the jungle, "not aggressively...but trying to alert the strangers that they were on the verge of making house in a minefield," to convincing Serbian smugglers to sneak 80,000 blankets into Bosnian territory by handing them certificates saying "UN Consultant," to Laurent Kabila's high-heeled lizard-skin disco dancing shoes (worn together with his starched uniform), Power has an amazing ability to pull out complex details that both grab/hold the reader's attention and act as metaphors for the bigger picture.
These are not the affect-oriented visuals that one associates with UNICEF commercials - the exceptions, like a scene of a Rwandan man committing suicide by drowning himself in a shallow puddle, are so powerful they could never fit into a cliché - rather, these moments are effortlessly telling precisely because they are complex and many sided. Power's writerly decisions turn the book into a page-turner as gripping as any novel, but their cumulative effect creates a picture of layers of our world that we don't normally see. The details accumulate and become more than themselves.
Other reviewers call Sergio a "hero." I don't know about that. I'm not even sure I came out of the book liking the guy. What did come through to me was a well-rounded picture of a very interesting man who kept learning as he shuttled from one tragic focal point of the world to another. Through Sergio, Power paints a real-life picture of the ultimately unsolvable tensions between pragmatism and idealism, and, more generally, of the way power and people interact in some of the most difficult conditions on our planet. If each detail is an expert brush stroke, then the painting, in the end, is not merely a portrait of Sergio. It is a complex portrait of a complex world, with Sergio simultaneously a fully fleshed out, conflicted, real person, and an archetype - the human being that, in the end, is the fulcrum of all tensions and decisions. What makes this book so important, besides its art, is that these are the real life tensions and decisions that have defined the world we live in.
To be honest, I only picked up Chasing the Flame out of respect for its Pulitzer-prize-winning author. A biography of a bureaucrat is not a subject that I would normally find interesting. But Power chose her subject well. For all his faults, Sergio was an extraordinary man whose willingness to keep learning from the awful historical moments in the centre of which he continually found himself -- which he, in fact, chased throughout his life -- makes him a powerful lens through which Power clears away layers of murk to show us a side of our world that is normally obscured. Chasing the Flame doesn't give easy answers, but it does give a graphic picture of the man who would have been the next UN Secretary General, and of the world behind the headlines in the international section. It's an extraordinary book. | | Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Penguin Press HC, The Brilliant | | An extraordinary book about the life-work of an extraordinary man. Those who rated this book poorly simply because they want something more exciting (and not too intellectual) will have to stick with fiction. | | Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Penguin Press HC, The Fawning, overlong hagiography of a rising, handsome UN bureaucrat | This, to all appearances, is a fawning, overlong hagiography of a rising UN bureaucrat. Sergio Vieira de Mello is blessed with matinee idol good looks and Sorbonne schooled charm. At the Sorbonne in 1968, he subscribed to the doctrines of Hegel, Marx, and Sartre, and joined in the student riots, acquiring a scar on his brow from a police truncheon, which he thenceforth proudly displays as a war wound. Other playful antics as a young UNHCR employee in Paris include the hurling of rocks and shouting, "Imperialiste!" at random American-made cars which pass on streets, and advising his friends that he won't talk to Americans because they "smell of capitalism."
Power's opening scene reads like satire: a romantic tete a tete over dinner and bottles of fine wine, when Vieira de Mello was a dashing 45 and she a blushing 24, on the night the Serbs violated the UN mandated safe zone and invaded Gorazde. Sergio seems much more interested in his dinner with the lovely Samantha.
A cell call comes in to the table from the UN Commander. Samantha gets up to give Sergio his privacy, but he waves her back to her seat. The winsome journalist is to observe Sergio's manly command of world affairs. The Serbs have relieved the UN peacekeepers of their guns then shot them, thumbing their nose at UN mandates. Soon, a second phone call says that a wounded peacekeeper has died. Oh well. The seasoned diplomat and the starry eyed girl get back to their cabernet.
Samantha asks what will the UN do? With a flourish Sergio pulls from his pocket a rumpled photocopy of the UN safe zone resolution, kept always, like an alibi, close to his chest. The member states have the UN they deserve, he thunders. Look at this language, at this comma! This comma placed just before the subordinate clause says that we are to protect the civilians in the safe zone, and yet how vague it all is. How unclear! This is all the fault of the member nations. They wrote it that way, damn them! Ah, they have the UN they deserve! You see this comma could, conceivably, be interpreted to mean that the UN mandate that peacekeepers defend themselves and protect safe zones in fact means, why, the very opposite! Voila. The UN can do nothing. We wouldn't want to be sued, god forbid, would we? Surely a fate worse than genocide. Here in black and white it is. We can do nothing. Nothing at all.
Sergio draws himself up, cocklike, proud in his UN-ness, in his advocacy of all that is good and global and true. He lectures his dinnermate on the UN's greatest and noblest principle: its "neutrality." And Samantha is -- wonderstruck with admiration! How elegant is Sergio. How passionate and scrupulous. Verily he is a hero, for he has read so deeply and so well the noble text of the UN resolution. He has perceived the weighty meaning of its comma. Why it has never even occurred to her, a lawyer, to read the text of a UN resolution. Yet the noble Sergio has done it with such panache. Such style. Such exquisite taste. Samantha is awestruck. She is deeply, deeply humbled.
600 pages of The Ballade of Sergio follow...
Perhaps it is all an exercise in subtle irony and under-cover truthtelling by Ms. Power. She is unquestionably a brilliant researcher and reporter. Her pious political correctitude can be appalling, and the book is far too long, but then, reporters don't get access if they don't kowtow. Her facts are likely to fuel all sides of the debate about whether the UN is of any use anymore, or is just a corrupt self-perpetuating bureaucracy which ought to be put out of business and replaced by some leaner such forum, preferably one with minimal standards of admission. | | Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Penguin Press HC, The A modern Hero | Samantha Powers portrayal of Sergio Vieira de Mello is a outstanding biography of a modern hero. It reads like a thriller and should win her another Pullitzer prize. Sergio was a man with passion for his convictions always ready to accept new challenges in dangerous areas of the world. Thanks to her book we have the depiction of a true hero that gave his life so that a bit of peace and justice could emerge from that part of the world.
Samantha should be congratulated and I hope she will be part of Obama foreign advise team.
Daniel Sette Camara, MD | | Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World by Penguin Press HC, The Product Description | 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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