A well-rendered account of one of the UN’s best in pursuit of “the flame of idealism that motivated many to strive to combat...
Biography of the handsome Brazilian intellectual who served as the UN’s top troubleshooter from East Timor and Bosnia to Iraq, where he died in a terrorist car bombing.
Pulitzer Prize–winner Power (Global Leadership/Harvard School of Government; “A Problem From Hell”: American and the Age of Genocide, 2002) draws on more than 400 interviews to offer this detailed portrait of charismatic Sergio Vieira de Mello (1948–2003), whom she first met in 1994 while working as a young reporter. A diplomat’s son, Sergio (as he was generally known) earned a doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne and took part in the Paris student revolt in May 1968. He joined the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1969 and remained with the organization until his death. Writing with a keen understanding of international affairs, Power traces each step of Sergio’s career: early humanitarian postings in Sudan, Mozambique and Peru; his initial encounter with terrorism in 1981 as a UN political advisor in Lebanon; and later work in Hong Kong and Cambodia that made his reputation as a pragmatic negotiator. Power describes a man who was always learning, reaching out to everyone from taxi drivers to thugs in the belief that to resolve problems all must be heard. An elegant charmer in his starched shirts and tailored suits, Sergio was a ladies’ man who frequently bedded colleagues and a deeply loyal UN official who neglected his wife and two children. Power shows how his winning ways, knowledge of Kantian philosophy and deep regard for the dignity of both people and nations made him a force for change. Her description of failed attempts to rescue Sergio from the rubble of the UN’s quarters in Baghdad, where he was Secretary General Kofi Annan’s special representative, is both riveting and heartbreaking.
A well-rendered account of one of the UN’s best in pursuit of “the flame of idealism that motivated many to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help would soon come.”Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-128-8
Page Count: 598
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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