Chasing the Flame , tells the life story of a remarkable man. Sergio 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, just as the battle lines in the twenty-first century's first great struggle were being drawn. In nearly four decades of work for the United Nations, de Mello negotiated with - and often charmed - Cold War military dictators, Marxist jungle radicals, reckless warlords, and nationalist and sectarian militia leaders. By bringing us the life of this man who saw more war than any other person of his generation, Samantha Power allows us to live the central humanitarian and geopolitical crises of the last two decades - the conflagration in the Middle East, through Vieira de Mello's trouble-shooting in Lebanon in the aftermath of Israel's 1982 invasion; the clean-up of the Cold War's residue, through his taming of the Khmer Rouge and repatriation of 400,000 Cambodian
