Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

by Samantha Power

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1594201285
• ISBN13: 9781594201288
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Penguin Press
• Length: 622 Pages
• Weight: 2.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Great biography

SERGIO is an extremely well written and reseached biography about a great humanitarian. If you like history of the second half of the 20th Century to present day, you will enjoy this book. It illuminates the work that Sergio Viera de Mello did for the United Nations in some of the most difficult parts of the world.

They only come as few as Sergio,

They, the people who fight for our rights come to this earth as few as possible, But what they accomplish!!!! What a powerful life and what vision,!, he is up there with all the greatest, Lincoln, J.F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and all others who went before him, trying to make this a better world for generations to come. Sergio, nothing is over!!!, Nothing is finished,!!!, your FIGHT FOR FREEDOM WILL LIVE ON!!!. Carolina, if you get this message, We cried all day long for you, for your pain, if you have a way to contact me, I am a writer, i am from Argentina, and I wrote a short story which I like to dedicate to Sergio, his family and the United Nations here is my e mail: [...] This documentary should be made into an international movie for theaters. Mr. Spielberg are you seeing it?

Chasing Sergio Viera de Mello

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 no

The ultimate go-to guy - "Sergio"

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

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.