Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World

When Samantha Power won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, many people wondered what she would write for an encore. Her answer is a groundbreaking biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello. 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. His life, and death in a terrorist attack on UN Headquarters in Iraq in 2003, helps frame many of the world’s crises and humanitarian challenges of the last few decades.

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?

In one of Power’s first appearances since the publication of Chasing the Flame, she will discuss her new book, genocide, the state of U.S. foreign policy and the 2008 Presidential election.

Participants

• Samantha Power
  Professor, Harvard University
  Founding Executive Director, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy
  Pulitzer Prize Winning Author

• Rev. David Gray (moderator)
  Director, Workforce and Family Program
  New America Foundation