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Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World | 
 enlarge | Author: Samantha Power
Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The
Category: Book
List Price: $32.95
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Rating:  13 reviews
Sales Rank: 9837
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 640
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.6
ISBN: 1594201285
Dewey Decimal Number: 341.48092
EAN: 9781594201288
ASIN: 1594201285
Publication Date: February 14, 2008
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Condition: All profits go to Housing Works -- NYC's largest HIV/AIDS organization. Minimal wear to cover, pages clean and binding tight. A great find. Hardcover.
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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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| Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 The ultimate go-to guy - "Sergio" February 18, 2008
Stephen Balbach (Ashton, MD United States)
61 out of 66 found this review helpful
Sergio Vieira de Mello of Brazil (simply "Sergio" to many) was the personification of what the United Nations could and should be. As Paul Bremer's adviser Ryan Cocker once said, "Sergio is as good as it gets not only for the UN, but for international diplomacy." Sergio was the UN Secretary General's "ultimate go-to guy", a nation builder in the world's toughest spots like East Timor, Cambodia, Kosovo. No one who met him - from George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq War, to the Khmer Rouge, to Slobodan Milosevic - came away untouched by his intelligence, physical bearing, charisma and integrity. It was a major blow to the world when he and 14 other UN staff were killed on August 19th 2003 by an al-Qeada suicide bomber at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad, an event that has become known as the UN's "9/11". He was often spoken of as candidate for the position of UN Secretary General, but his career was cut short before he had a chance to become the world-renowned elder statesman he was destined to be. This biography by Pulitzer Prize winning Samantha Power is a monument to his legacy and should connect with a wide audience. Not only an enthralling story of adventure (Sergio was almost always in the field in dangerous situations and places), but equally a revelation of what was happening behind the headlines in major crisis around the world over the past 30 years - and it is the story of the UN itself, as mirrored in the ups and downs of Sergio's life and character, its faults, weaknesses and strengths.
Power has managed to convey Sergio's persona with utmost sympathy, seductively drawing the reader into Sergio's world. His younger staff members were often likened to puppy dogs who followed him around, at one point even into the bushes to take a leak - I often felt this way reading his biography, like a puppy dog I didn't want him to leave or for the book to end, for the inevitable to happen. I dreaded the last chapter titled "August 19 2003" - it is the most thrilling chapter in the book, a masterpiece of journalistic writing - it can bring the reader to tears in a way no fiction could achieve. Samantha Power is an adviser to Barak Obama "the person whose rigor and compassion bear the closest resemblance to Sergio's that I have ever seen," she says in the credits. Power also knows Terry George, director of Hotel Rwanda, who advised her on this book and who expressed an interest in making a movie version, we can only hope.
Brilliant and important -- must read February 14, 2008
kjkstar
39 out of 45 found this review helpful
Samantha Power has done it again -- just as compelling, just as timely and just as important as The Problem From Hell. The story of Sergio Vieira de Mello would be compelling stuff in its own right. But the way Power sets Vieira de Mello's story against the most immediate and consequential questions about how to best deal with the current challenges in the world is absolutely brilliant. Read it for the story, read it for the questions, read it for the answers, just make sure you read it soon.
 Primary Research Well Done, Lacks Synthesis March 9, 2008
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
8 out of 23 found this review helpful
Book loses one star--perhaps unfairly--for not integrating secondary sources and using the *combination* of this extraordinary biography and the Brahimi Report and other core documents, to illuminate why the UN desperately needs a United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN).
+ Sergio Vieira de Mello (henceforth SVM) spent forty-years as a UN gad-fly, and his resume of tens of short assignments interspersed with a handful of 2-3 year assignments is a testimony to all that is wrong--not with him, but rather--with UN recruitment, training, continuity of operations, and lack of decision support.
+ The book opens with the observation that Paul Bremer (the ultimate US dilettante who set us back five to ten years while losing tens of billions of dollars) refused most of SVM's suggestions, especially on setting timelines (the same ideas General Garner adopted before he was fired by Dick Cheney and replaced with Bremer). We are told his last words were "Oh shit" and I somehow doubt that.
+ Vague mandates were a constant problem (see Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future for a full discussion of why the Brahimi Report still needs to be implemented, so the mandate can be informed, the force configured based on ground truth, etc.)
+ UN got into "governing" for the first time in Kosovo, and was completely ill-equipped for the task.
+ SVM reflected with the author that the world was too big to ignore but too complex to manage quickly or cheaply. Later in the book he is cited as recognizing that the UN is so dysfunctional that governments work around it (while foundations beg for effective focal points for their giving totaling $500B a year), but that governments are not prone to support long term interests in eradicating the ten high level threats as lain out in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility--Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
+ SVM was an impressive scholar. He finished first out of 198 at the Sorbonne in Philosophy. He did a Masters in moral philosophy (a tautological redundancy I would have thought) and then a doctoral in two levels, one in 1974 and one in 1985. It was here that he understood that governments are not adept at preventing crises nor as rebuilding failed societies.
- First level doctorate: "The Role of Philosophy in Contemporary History," with key line "Not only has history ceased to feed philosophy, but philosophy no longer feeds history."
- Second "Etat" doctorate: "Civitas Maxima; Origins, Foundations, and Philosophical and Practical Significance of the Supranational Concept." Those wishing to learn more about the failure of the nation-state and the mistakes of Westphalia can begin with The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State with Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq, from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush as the aperitif, and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health as the strong finish.
+ He composed his speeches on hotel note pads, observing that if he could not fit his argument to a hotel pad, he probably did not know what he was trying to say.
+ At this point I have a note, overall a very good use of biography to offer a "sense" of the UN, but lacking in synthesis, recommendations, or secondary sources.
+ Early in the book and throughout, one senses that Lebanon is the UN's modern birthplace, and where it has been permanently hospitalized if not euthanized.
+ SVM is quoted as saying that constructive change required "a synthesis of utopia and realism." I urge the reader to visit Earth Intelligence Network to see this being implemented.
+ Pages 87-89 provide a marvelous condemnation of satellite surveillance as a panacea. SPOT Image which does ten meter or 1:50,000 multispectral imagery, identified land "suitable for resettlement." Actual ground inspection failed the satellite findings, which did not see the land mines or the malarial mosquitoes.
+ SVM valued local staff, actively cultivated their inputs regardless of rank or function, and he is described as having a keen eye for symbolism.
+ We learn from this book that UN "teams" are assembled in an ad hoc fashion reflecting the whims and past good relations of the ubber boss, and I for one recognized what chaos and discontinuity this represents for all elements of the UN System.
+ We learn that when the UN arrives the cost of everything skyrockets, not least because UN employees get $140 a day, which in the specific instance of Cambodia or Kosovo, I forget, was the average ANNUAL income for any given person. I point to William Shawcross's unforgettable Deliver Us from Evil: Peacekeepers, Warlords and a World of Endless Conflict. Read my review of that book to see the relevance.
+ SVM proves clever in one instance, suggesting that smugglers not only be hired to get around a blockage against blankets, but that they be given dignity in the form of a UN consultant certificate. From many such accounts the author excels at painting a portrait of a complex and very intelligence UN official.
+ It is at this point that I check the index to discover that neither the word "information" nor the word "intelligence" nor the compound word "decision-support" appear.
+ The author cites SVM as saying that he was fed up with American bullying--I can certainly understand that--and that the hardest part of peacekeeping was internal peacekeeping (within the UN's dysfunctional family).
+ It is here I note: "At every turn: 'We don't know; 'We don't have the information; 'We are too few to certify....'"
+ Then I see the golden nugget, on page 219, in his words: "We are so remarkably ill-informed. We go into a place, we have no intelligence, we don't understand the politics, and we can't identify the points of leverage. See the PKI book cited above, and also the forthcoming book, PEACE INTELLIGENCE: Assuring a Good Life for All, with a Foreword by MajGen Patrick Cammaert, who with this book and a decade of effort, got many at the UN to understand that Brahimi had it exactly right: intelligence is decision support using legal ethical open sources, and it has nothing to do with espionage. The raw book is at OSS.Net/Peace, just add the www. at the beginning.
+ The book continues with many vignettes where the UN elements are uninformed, therefore they do poor planning (lousy mandates, crummy force structures, no tactical combat charts for landing zones, etc) and hence they are often over-whelmed.
+ SVM saw a need for and proposed that the UN address the constant law enforcement gap by maintaining a roster of pre-trained and available multinational police, judges, lawyers, and prosecutors. See Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, my review includes notice of the fact that most UN "police," e.g. those from Nigeria, can neither read nor drive.
+ We learn that SVM was acutely aware of how the UN's reputation for competence plummeted in the 1990's and how he learned in East Timor was that Legitimacy was Performance Based. As a side note, when East Timor went down I led one of 40 different efforts to answer the same three questions: 1) where are the bodies; 2) where can we land; and 3) who is is coming when, and what are they bringing. That was when I realized the need for a Multinational Decision-Support Center. On legitimacy, see The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
+ The book comes to a close with several useful notes.
- Law and order gap a constant recurring theme.
- SVR saw Iraq as a peer nation meriting respect rather than patronizing from the US
- Excellent discussion of the days leading up to the attack on the UN headquarters; to the dismissal by the US of all UN requests for information or security, and the realization, too late after the attack on the Jordanian embassy, that the UN HQ was a "soft target."
- KUDOS to LtCol John Curran, whose foresight and rehearsal to include identification of all relevant helicopter med-evac landing zones, ensured that no one died for lack of very rapid medical evacuation. I certainly hope the UN put him for a Legion of Merit, at the very least.
The Epilogue is bland.
+ UN is a broken system.
+ SVM said "the future is to be invented."
+ Legitimacy matters
+ Spoilers must be engaged
+ Fearful people must be made more secure
+ Dignity is cornerstone of order
+ Outsiders must bring humility and patience.
Two other books (see also my many lists):
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, Third Edition
Chasing Sergio Viera de Mello March 18, 2008
James Arbuckle (Mondsee, Austria)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Samantha Power has rendered a great service to students of international affairs, and indeed to the international community at large, with this splendid biography of a gifted actor on that great stage.
Vieira de Mello personified the United Nations in both its strengths and its weaknesses, and Power makes very clear just what those are.
He embodied the spirit of the internationalist: neutrality, impartiality and unfailing courage to go where the member states were too often reluctant to go - but not reluctant at all to send people like him, who never, until the end, hesitated to answer the call of duty. At the same time, his zeal for impartiality too often led him into a moral relativism which eventually became distorted into complicity with evil. He was quicker than many to realize that trap that the world body had fallen into, especially in reflecting on the U.N.'s experiences in Rwanda and in Bosnia Herzegovina in the 1990's.
Sergio Vieira de Mello was a renaissance man: philosopher, linguist, historian, scholar of many fields. He was a charming and handsome man, a highly sociable man who was nevertheless capable of brutally hard work, often under conditions as uncomfortable as they were dangerous. He was concerned about all the peoples with and for whom he worked, and cared - and showed he cared - for individual refugees and displaced persons as for the most junior of his co-workers. He was intensely ambitious, but never hesitated to dispute the views, policies and directions of his desk-bound "superiors" in New York and in the capitols of the member states. In the most striking example of this, he completely revised the intent of the mission in East Timor, devolving a degree of autonomy on the East Timorese quite other than that in his mandate, and on a timetable of his own devising. New York was appalled at this, but Vieira de Mello left the Secretariat little alternative but to accept his re-writing his own orders. It was just this early devolution and restoration of sovereignty that he urged on the Coalition Authority in Iraq, but to no avail - L.Paul Bremer had his mind made up, and his mistakes are becoming history, but a very different history than the one Vieira de Mello made in East Timor.
The only time in his long career that Vieira de Mello expressed reluctance to accept a posting was his last - to Iraq as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General. He arrived in Baghdad on June 2, 2003. When he died there six weeks later it was, as Power writes in the last line of the book, as though he had been "buried beneath the weight of the United Nations itself."
Samantha Power is to be congratulated on this fine book. It will be read by those concerned with the history Vieira de Mello lived, but will also be enjoyed by and will reward those less informed of the events described. It may be read as a huge adventure story - for that was what Vieira de Mello's life was, and Power has captured that spirit of adventure with a novelist's skill. Sergio Vieira de Mello was the United Nations' Kennedy,and we who hardly knew him can only express our thanks for her contribution to our knowledge and understanding of these interesting times.
It only remains to wait for the movie - and trust that Tom Cruise will not be the star.
Excellent book. Good read on how the UN works and doesn't work March 25, 2008
Michael Kendellen (Washington DC)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is an excellent book with some flaws. While there are plenty of good quotes that take jabs at the field work done by the UN including by Sergio Vieira de Mello himself none of them are adequately examined, but then you could say that wasn't the point of the book. I have comments on three of the countries de Mello (the name most people called him that I knew) worked.
1. Jarat Chopra resigned over deep disagreements with de Mello about governing East Timor but Ms Power never says what they are. Two essays by Chopra found online provide a view from the other side. In the book one of them is a mere footnote. They are worth reading.
2. While the book makes de Mello look like almost a one man show in Rwanda I recommend Sadako Ogata's book The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s on her time as the head of UNHCR to get a another perspective of how the upper echelon of the UN works. Her chapter on Rwanda gives a much more detailed and compelling story of this very difficult situation where UNHCR was left on its own. The chapters on Bosnia also provide a wider view.
3. Then there is Iraq and the riveting final chapter in the book. It's an excellent narrative on the declining security situation in Baghdad in June-September 2003 and how institutions like the UN reacted to it.
I was dismayed with the Epilogue. It was so boring I considered not finishing the book after reading more than 500 pages. It read like a UN document, that's how bad it is.
As an observation, no matter how good de Mello was and no matter how good and loyal his staff was at the field level most aid workers are not aware of these efforts or even know who these people are. The UN is there monitoring and more often than not, interpreting rules on why something cannot be done and being criticized for its lack of competence. Programs run by the UN are sometimes successful despite the unintentional efforts of the UN to ruin them. Even with de Mello, the UN had a long way to go and it still does.
My favorite quote in the book - and there are many good ones - is the response he gave to a young UNHCR staffer at his farewell in Geneva. When asked what advice he had to give to a young staff member, he said, "Be in the field. That's what I built my career on. That's what relevant. Nothing else matters."
Overall, an excellent book. Well written. Re-building a country is not easy. I highly recommend this book.
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