A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

Samantha Power

ISBN 10: 0061120146 / ISBN 13: 9780061120145

Editore: Harper Perennial, 2007

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In 1993, as a 23-year-old correspondent covering the wars in the Balkans, I was initially comforted by the roar of NATO planes flying overhead. President Clinton and other western leaders had sent the planes to monitor the Bosnian war, which had killed almost 200,000 civilians. But it soon became clear that NATO was unwilling to target those engaged in brutal ethnic cleansing. American statesmen described Bosnia as a problem from hell, and for three and a half years refused to invest the diplomatic and military capital needed to stop the murder of innocents. In Rwanda, around the same time, some 800,000 Tutsi and opposition Hutu were exterminated in the swiftest killing spree of the twentieth century. Again, the United States failed to intervene. This time U.S. policy-makers avoided labeling events genocide and spearheaded the withdrawal of UN peacekeepers stationed in Rwanda who might have stopped the massacres underway. Whatever America's commitment to Holocaust remembrance (embodied in the presence of the Holocaust Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C.), the United States has never intervened to stop genocide. This book is an effort to understand why. While the history of America's response to genocide is not an uplifting one, A Problem from Hell tells the stories of countless Americans who took seriously the slogan of never again and tried to secure American intervention. Only by understanding the reasons for their small successes and colossal failures can we understand what we as a country, and we as citizens, could have done to stop the most savage crimes of the last century.

Codice articolo CIN0061120146G

Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide
• Editore: Harper Perennial
• Data di pubblicazione: 2007
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0061120146
• ISBN 13: 9780061120145
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

In her award-winning interrogation of the last century of American history, Samantha Power—a former Balkan war correspondent and founding executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy—asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow "never again" repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington's top policy makers, access to newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power provides the answer in "A Problem from Hell," a groundbreaking work that tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act.

Recensione

“A superb analysis of the US government’s evident unwillingness to intervene in ethnic slaughter...” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review))

“An angry, brilliant, fiercely useful, absolutely essential book.” (The New Republic)

“Agonizingly persuasive.” (New York Review of Books)

“[A Problem From Hell] challenges our conscience and should influence what we do in the future.’’ (Lawrence H. Summers, President, Harvard University)

“Magisterial.” (The New Yorker)

“Disturbing...engaging and well written...will likely become the standard text on genocide prevention.” (Foreign Affairs)

“Compelling...Power leads her readers on a long and often gut-wrenching journey.... Power’s book raises vital questions.” (Reason)

“[Power] is one of the most striking talents to emerge in the human rights field in a long time.” (Aryeh Neier, founder of Human Rights Watch)

“One of those rare books that can change one’s thinking...very painful reading, but it has to be read.’’ (Former UN Ambassador Richard Holbrooke)

“A history of our country that has never before been told... it should change the way we see America..” (Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II)