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.

"The death of the charismatic Brazilian chief of the U.N. Mission to Iraq in a 2003 terrorist bombing symbolized both the U.N.'s haplessness — he died because rescuers lacked the training and equipment to free him from the rubble — and its idealism. In this sprawling biography, Vieira de Mello's life symbolizes the tragic contradictions of coping with humanitarian crises. Journalist Power, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, follows Vieira de Mello through a U.N. career spent in hot spots like Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. His tasks were many: implementing peace accords, settling refugees, overseeing elections, running the government of East Timor. In each posting, he confronts a hydra-headed monster of communal violence and poverty, plus difficulties compounded by U.N. red tape, miserly budgets and uncaring Western governments. Agonizing dilemmas abound. Should refugees be fed or sent home? Should U.N. peacekeepers observe or intervene? Should past atrocities be prosecuted or overlooked? Playing by ear, Vieira de Mello charts an erratic course through these conundrums. Sometimes he's a human rights zealot, sometimes he cozies up to the Khmer Rouge; sometimes he negotiates with the Serbs, sometimes he wants to bomb them. Vieira de Mello comes off as a charming diplomat, a canny politician and an inspiring leader, and the author celebrates his flexibility and pragmatism (while criticizing his failures). Power wants to extract lasting lessons for the international community's efforts to head off humanitarian catastrophes and mend failed states from his experience. Unfortunately, it's hard to discern through his improvisations any systematic approach to nation building or to such vexed issues as humanitarian military intervention and regime change. The lack of perspective isn't helped by the biographical format, as the peripatetic Vieira de Mello jets from one conflagration to the next, then on to a romantic getaway with a mistress or to give a murky speech on Kant. We get the impression that U.N. missions are inevitably a hopeless muddle unless Sergio, with his unique talents, parachutes in to fix things; the book may thus inadvertently encourage critics of the U.N.-style interventionism that Power supports. Readers will gain an appreciation of Vieira de Mello's gifts, but not the method to his magic. B&w photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"In hot spot after hot spot over the past 30 years, the face of the United Nations was Sergio Vieira de Mello. U.N. secretaries-general, no matter how much they travel, are of necessity tied to New York, running a huge bureaucracy. But the lower-ranking Vieira de Mello, a Brazilian who became a career U.N. official, spent most of his life on the ground in the world's worst hellholes.

... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) His resume looked like a survey of international instability: He worked in Lebanon, Cambodia, Rwanda, Sudan and Afghanistan. He was in Bosnia at the peak of Serbian atrocities. He served as the U.N."s viceroy in Kosovo, running relief efforts and government services after the 1999 war. Then, he moved to East Timor, where he directed the country's transition to independence. Perhaps inevitably, when Secretary General Kofi Annan was looking for someone to lead U.N. operations in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, he turned to his most trusted hand, his special envoy for chaos and disaster. When Vieira de Mello was killed in Baghdad in a 2003 truck bombing, the United Nations lost the most courageous and charismatic diplomat in a generation — a man who yearned to solve the world's crises and who kept a flak jacket on the coat rack in his New York office.

In 'Chasing the Flame,' Samantha Power set out not merely to write a biography of Vieira de Mello, but also to glean from his life some larger lessons. The underlying questions are profound ones: how the international community should cope with ethnic unrest, civil wars and genocide; how much power the world's governments should give to the United Nations; how much difference one person can make. Her book is an ambitious effort, a long, meandering narrative that in the end succeeds brilliantly but is so slow-paced, especially in its early pages, as to leave the reader wishing Vieira de Mello would grow up, move on or find some epiphany amid the serial catastrophes.

Power, a professor at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, won a Pulitzer Prize for her previous book, '"A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide.' She is also a foreign-policy adviser to Barack Obama and a likely candidate for some high-level position in an Obama administration, so her writing provides clues to the positions she might espouse once in government. In the course of examining Vieira de Mello's views, she sets out her own: In severe crises, mere humanitarian missions are not enough; the international community must be prepared to use force to keep the peace. 'Security is the first priority, and the second priority, and the third priority, and the fourth priority,' she quotes Vieira de Mello as saying. Power does not want the United States to be the world's policeman, but she does think there should be a tough cop out there, a multilateral one — preferably a transformed United Nations that has far greater support from the United States and other leading powers than it does today.

This book, like her earlier one, grew out of Power's experience as a correspondent in Bosnia, where she met Vieira de Mello in 1994. A fellow journalist had described him as 'a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy.' Power was charmed and intrigued. But her depiction of Vieira de Mello, while sympathetic, is not mere hagiography. His flaws are explored in some detail. One of his conceits, early in his career, was the idea that, as part of his U.N. job, he should avoid moral judgments and develop productive relationships even with some of the world's nastiest thugs. He visited Khmer Rouge leaders in Cambodia. He talked to the Taliban. As a favor, he delivered a copy of the New York Review of Books to the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic; his efforts at neutrality in Bosnia earned him the caustic nickname 'Serbio.' Power does not seek to explain away this behavior. 'He seemed more interested in being liked and in maintaining access than in standing up for those who were suffering,' she writes. She argues that Vieira de Mello changed his views later in life — that, in the mid-1990s, the massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda chastened and transformed him. Perhaps so, but this is the one part of the book where one wishes for more detailed evidence than she provides.

She also depicts Vieira de Mello as a careerist and a womanizer. He clearly hoped, for a time, to be U.N. secretary general, although, given his distaste for bureaucracy and his preference for work in the field, he was lucky it never happened. Though married, he seemed to find a new woman in each place, or to bring one with him. 'Come with me to Cambodia, I need a special assistant,' he told a Dutch woman with whom he'd been having a romance in Geneva. She went; the affair ended soon after he left the assignment.

The strength of the book lies in Power's use of Vieira de Mello's life (and death) as a well-placed window on the international community's successes and failures. There have been several other good books about the United Nations, but they are told from the perspective of New York. Power looks at the U.N. from the field.

From Kosovo, where he headed a U.N. mission that went behind Serb lines in the midst of the NATO bombing campaign, Vieira de Mello secretly carried out notes, film and videotape that eventually led to the prosecution of Balkan war crimes. There and elsewhere, Power says, he was 'unflappable, impeccable and seemingly untouchable while the shells rained down around him.' Yet Vieira de Mello gradually saw the limits of what he was doing. Humanitarian work was not just about food, water and shelter but also about protecting civilians from thugs. Sometimes the U.N."s efforts were weak because the world's leading powers didn't want to do what would be effective. The classic example was Bosnia, although Vieira de Mello learned the lesson only retrospectively. 'Instead of using the Security Council to establish and enforce a new global order,' Power writes, 'the major powers sent lightly armed peacekeepers into harm's way simply to monitor the carnage.' Vieira de Mello also found that the U.N. bureaucracy could be deadening. In the most eloquent sentence in the book, Power concludes that the U.N. 'had a knack for "killing the flame" — the flame of idealism that motivated many to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help would soon come.'

Power's style as a writer is to accumulate detail after detail. Occasionally, this distracts from her larger themes; one learns far too much about Vieira de Mello's courtship habits, office politics, his colleagues' travel plans, even the dumb jingles they wrote in his honor. In the final section on Iraq, however, that same layering of detail makes for a chilling account of the Aug. 19, 2003, suicide attack on the U.N. mission that took the lives of Vieira de Mello and 22 others. On CNN, she writes, 'Wolf Blitzer turned to the camera and told his viewers that it was their turn to weigh in on the story. "Our Web question of the day is: Is Iraq becoming a quagmire for the U.S.? We'll have results later in this broadcast."'

Vieira de Mello eventually figured out how to work the U.N. and bend its rules, but he also discovered that, in Power's words, 'there was only so much one U.N. civil servant could do.' The United Nations couldn't function well unless countries, particularly the major powers, let it change — and to do that, they had to change themselves. 'He was deeply worried that the system he had joined thirty-four years before was not up to the task of dealing with the barbarism and lawlessness of the times,' she writes. 'Twentieth-century rules were no match for twenty-first-century crises.'

James Mann, the author of 'Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet,' is author in residence at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies."

Reviewed by James Mann, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Samantha Power has mined the tragic 2003 death of UN High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello in Iraq to tell an even bigger story. For three decades Vieira de Mello courageously embodied the oft-maligned and seemingly hopeless UN mission to bring kindness, sanity, and peace to a cruel and war-torn world. He ultimately was martyred to it, struggling to salvage order out of the mess the US invasion had made in Iraq. In this captivating life story, the charming Brazilian internationalist emerges as a wry, Scotch-loving, womanizing philosopher, a kind of secular saint who wedded his considerable personal ambition to the best hopes of mankind. It is a stirring portrait of courage and tenaciously pragmatic idealism."
-Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah and national correspondent for The Atlantic.

"The best way to understand today's messy world is to appreciate the inspiring life and diplomatic genius of Vieira de Mello. Samantha Powers has done a brilliant job. This is a compelling biography of a fascinating man but also more: through his life and tragic death we get a better feel for how to deal with the challenges of religious extremism, refugees, terrorism, and ethnic struggle. If only he were still alive! Read this book and weep, read it and understand, read it and cheer."
— Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Einstein: His Life and Universe

From a Pulitzer Prize-winning author comes an epic tale--part thriller, part tragedy--of the political career of humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello and his tragic death in 2003 in a terrorist attack on UN Headquarters in Iraq.

Samantha Power is the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy Practice at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a foreign policy columnist at Time magazine. In 2003, her book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award for general nonfiction, the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, and the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy.