| Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World |  | Author: Samantha Power
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Category: Book
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Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 189,616
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 640
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.4 x 1.3
ISBN: 0143114859
Dewey Decimal Number: 341.48092
EAN: 9780143114857
ASIN: 0143114859
Publication Date: December 2, 2008
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Product Description
In this perfect match of author and subject, Pulitzer Prizewinner 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 Cambodias 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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
 The ultimate go-to guy - "Sergio" February 18, 2008
Stephen Balbach (Ashton, MD United States)
71 out of 75 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
41 out of 48 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.
Excellent book. Good read on how the UN works and doesn't work March 25, 2008
Michael Kendellen (Washington DC)
11 out of 12 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.
A powerful portrait of both a man and a world April 23, 2008
Alexander Boldizar
7 out of 7 found this review helpful
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 Sergio Viera de Mello March 18, 2008
James Arbuckle (Mondsee, Austria)
7 out of 7 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.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
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