Sergio: One Man's Fight to Save the World [NOOK Book]

Samantha Power serves in the Obama administration as the Special Assistant to the President for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights. Her previous book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, was awarded the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award for the best book on U.S. foreign policy, and the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Biography

Far more interested in athletics than current affairs, Power dreamed of becoming a sports journalist à la Bob Costas. Her great awakening occurred shortly after her freshman year at Yale. Working in Atlanta for a CBS television affiliate, she was preparing sports highlights for a news broadcast when the live feed picked up footage from Tiananmen Square. In a 2002 interview, Power recalled her reaction: "It was one of the most shocking things I had ever seen…and I thought, 'Oh, my God. What am I doing with my life?' [That] was actually the discrete…moment in time when I decided to revisit my career plans." The sports fan had discovered there was a big, bad world outside.

After graduation, Power worked for a year with the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington, D.C., then traveled to Bosnia in 1993 as a war correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, The Economist, and other publications. She took time out to attend Harvard Law School, then "commuted" back and forth to Bosnia from 1995 to 1996. Her experiences there gave rise to the idea for a book about America's (non-)response to 20th-century genocide. Published to universal acclaim, A Problem from Hell won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

In 2008, Power published Chasing the Flame, the story of Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the charismatic Brazilian humanitarian and U.N. diplomat who was killed along with 21 members of his staff in a 2003 hotel bombing in Iraq. More than a biography, the ambitious book views the tragic history of humanitarian crises all over the globe through the prism of de Mello's fascinating life.

Power remains a working journalist committed to bringing world's attention to the ongoing problems of genocide, human rights abuse, and health crises around the world. In addition, she has held various academic posts in colleges and universities and serves as a scholar and advisor on foreign policy.

Good To Know

On her mother: "She's completely single-minded. She was the Irish squash champ, and played in Wimbledon for tennis, and meanwhile got a Ph.D. in biochemistry and a medical degree, and is just an extraordinary woman."

On what she's learned from sports: "Everything. Everything. I learned to fail, and I learned to keep getting up."