Blogs and Stories
Azar Nafisi's Nightstand
The author of Reading Lolita in Tehran recommends a book for President Obama and shares some of her favorite reads.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World. By Samantha Power. 640 Pages. Penguin. $17.
Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World
by Samantha Power
This book does not offer easy formulas on dealing with the world, but a new attitude, a different way of perceiving it and changing it.
This is one of those books that tempt one to make statements such as “President Obama, nay, anyone in the foreign-policy world should read this book—very carefully!” But of course to say this is to reduce a richly complex book into a mere handbook for U.S. foreign policy. This book does not offer easy formulas on dealing with the world, but a new attitude, a different way of perceiving it and changing it. Chasing the Flame, the biography of the charismatic U.N. commissioner for human rights who was killed in Iraq in 2003, is a multilayered story, rich with anecdotes and voices, that resonate on many different levels. On one level it is about Sergio de Mello’s personal life (seductive, charismatic and intellectual, a lethal combination), but also it reveals the paradoxes and complexities of an agency such as the U.N. and the problems of dealing with “evil,” with individuals and states that accept no rules, and set no limits to their appetite for cruelty and brutality. And in the end it is also a homage to the idea of individual integrity, to the idea that not just greed and brutality but also the aspirations that shape mankind, the desire to have the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are also universal and shared by people from different places and different cultures. Once we agree with this supposition then we will perhaps agree that observing human rights is not a philanthropic idea but a pragmatic one, related to our own survival as much as it is related to the survival of others.
John Talks Joe
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Family Secrets in Tehran
Azar Nafisi is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran and the new memoir Things I've Been Silent About. She is a visiting professor and the director of the SAIS Dialogue Project at the Foreign Policy Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, where she is a professor of aesthetics, culture, and literature, and teaches courses on the relation between culture and politics.
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.
Please log in to leave comments.