Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira De Mello and the Fight to Save the World
Author: Samantha Power File Type: mobi From Publishers WeeklyThe death of the charismatic Brazilian chief of the U.N. Mission to Iraq in a 2003 terrorist bombing symbolized both the U.N.s haplessnesshe died because rescuers lacked the training and equipment to free him from the rubbleand its idealism. In this sprawling biography, Vieira de Mellos life symbolizes the tragic contradictions of coping with humanitarian crises. Journalist Power, author of the Pulitzer-winning The Problem from Hell America and the Age of Genocide, follows Vieira de Mello through a U.N. career spent in hot spots like Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo. His tasks were many implementing peace accords, settling refugees, overseeing elections, running the government of East Timor. In each posting, he confronts a hydra-headed monster of communal violence and poverty, plus difficulties compounded by U.N. red tape, miserly budgets and uncaring Western governments. Agonizing dilemmas abound. Should refugees be fed or sent home? Should U.N. peacekeepers observe or intervene? Should past atrocities be prosecuted or overlooked? Playing by ear, Vieira de Mello charts an erratic course through these conundrums. Sometimes hes a human rights zealot, sometimes he cozies up to the Khmer Rouge sometimes he negotiates with the Serbs, sometimes he wants to bomb them. Vieira de Mello comes off as a charming diplomat, a canny politician and an inspiring leader, and the author celebrates his flexibility and pragmatism (while criticizing his failures). Power wants to extract lasting lessons for the international communitys efforts to head off humanitarian catastrophes and mend failed states from his experience. Unfortunately, its hard to discern through his improvisations any systematic approach to nation building or to such vexed issues as humanitarian military intervention and regime change. The lack of perspective isnt helped by the biographical format, as the peripatetic Vieira de Mello jets from one conflagration to the next, then on to a romantic getaway with a mistress or to give a murky speech on Kant. We get the impression that U.N. missions are inevitably a hopeless muddle unless Sergio, with his unique talents, parachutes in to fix things the book may thus inadvertently encourage critics of the U.N.-style interventionism that Power supports. Readers will gain an appreciation of Vieira de Mellos gifts, but not the method to his magic. B&w photos. (Mar. 6) br Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. From Bookmarks MagazineSamantha Power, a professor at Harvard, met Sergio Vieira de Mello when she was a journalist in Bosnia in 1994. Although he charmed her as he did everyone else, she has written a balanced biography of the flawed but dedicated and likable man. While Power impressed the critics with her research, she failed to convince all of them of her arguments. Several reviewers also noted that Poweras writing, laden with detail and subtle layering, doesnat rise to the level of her Pulitzer Prizeawinning A Problem from Hell America and the Age of Genocide (2002) until the very end, when she recounts Vieira de Melloas last moments. As much a critique of the United Nations and its policies as the story of a man battling injustice, Chasing the Flame, despite being cited as a somewhat slow read, is a significant contribution to our understanding of global affairs and the future of peacekeeping.br 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Author: Bruce G. Trigger
File Type: pdf
Review...the authors present an amazing amount of useful material and authoritative and carefully balanced judgements, from which general readers can profit and against which scholars can check their own studies. Francis Paul Prucha, Indiana Magazine of HistoryThis work consists of the two handsome books....it will serve as a benchmark on the state of aboriginal research in the 1990s. It is a good work and deserves a place on the bookshelves of Native Studies specialists. Ontario History...an impressive summing-up of Euro-American scholarship on Aboriginal peoples in the early 1990s. It will be a boon to students as they begin research on a particular period or topic. J.R. Miller, Canadian Historical ReviewThe Cambridge History of the Native People of the Americas is an impressive and formidable collection of three two- volume boxed sets that summarizes scholarship on Indian peoples as it existed by the end of the twentieth century...the Cambridge History is a land mark achievement. The broad sweep of the volumes reveals the tremendous diversity of Native American societies, cultures, languages, and historic experiences...It will enjoy a long shelf-life as a handbook even as new research, new publications, and new discoveries counter and qualify some of its contents. Tearsheet From William & Mary Quarterly Review...the authors present an amazing amount of useful material and authoritative and carefully balanced judgements, from which general readers can profit and against which scholars can check their own studies. Francis Paul Prucha, Indiana Magazine of HistoryThis work consists of the two handsome books....it will serve as a benchmark on the state of aboriginal research in the 1990s. It is a good work and deserves a place on the bookshelves of Native Studies specialists. Ontario History...an impressive summing-up of Euro-American scholarship on Aboriginal peoples in the early 1990s. It will be a boon to students as they begin research on a particular period or topic. J.R. Miller, Canadian Historical ReviewThe Cambridge History of the Native People of the Americas is an impressive and formidable collection of three two- volume boxed sets that summarizes scholarship on Indian peoples as it existed by the end of the twentieth century...the Cambridge History is a land mark achievement. The broad sweep of the volumes reveals the tremendous diversity of Native American societies, cultures, languages, and historic experiences...It will enjoy a long shelf-life as a handbook even as new research, new publications, and new discoveries counter and qualify some of its contents. Tearsheet From William & Mary Quarterly
Author: Joshua Dressler
File Type: pdf
The encyclopedia of crime & justice not only discusses many different kinds of crime--from perjury to terrorism--but also looks at law enforcement, legal procedures and penalties and the social causes and wide-ranging impact of crimes on society. The articles reflect issues dominating the news and entertainment media--topics that are frequently discussed or assigned in both high school and college curricula. What is perjury? How do copyright laws pertain to the Internet? Can a juvenile be tried as an adult for murder? In 250 A-Z entries, these interdisciplinary articles deal with the sociology, psychology, history and economics of crime.
Author: Sotiris Mitralexis
File Type: pdf
The study of Maximus the Confessors thought has flourished in recent years international conferences, publications and articles, new critical editions and translations mark a torrent of interest in the work and influence of perhaps the most sublime of the Byzantine Church Fathers. It has been repeatedly stated that the Confessors thought is of eminently philosophical interest. However, no dedicated collective scholarly engagement with Maximus the Confessor as a philosopher has taken place--and this volume attempts to start such a discussion. Apart from Maximus relevance and importance for philosophy in general, a second question arises should towering figures of Byzantine philosophy like Maximus the Confessor be included in an overview of the European history of philosophy, or rather excluded from it--as is the case today with most histories of European philosophy? Maximus philosophy challenges our understanding of what European philosophy is. In this volume, we begin to address these issues and examine numerous aspects of Maximus philosophy--thereby also stressing the interdisciplinary character of Maximian studies. **
Author: Marcel Proust
File Type: epub
In these inspiring essays about why we read, Proust explores all the pleasures and trials that we take from books, as well as explaining the beauty of Ruskin and his work, and the joys of losing yourself in literature as a child. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.
Author: Angela Leighton
File Type: pdf
Hearing Things is a meditation on sounds work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing. An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poetsAlfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice OswaldLeightons scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text. **
Author: Leon Harold Craig
File Type: pdf
This book on Shakespeares Henriad studies the tetralogy as a work of political thought. Leon Craig, author of two previous volumes on Shakespeares political thought, argues that the four plays present Shakespeares teaching on the question of who has the right to rule, one of the perennial questions of political philosophy. Offering original interpretations of each of the plays, Craig discusses divine right in Richard II, political upheavaland disputed rule in Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, and just rule in Henry V. In addition Craig shows how the four plays constitute one narrative -- starting in Richard II and concluding in Henry V -- tellingthe story of the making of a legitimate ruler, Englands most famous warrior king, Henry V. The Philosophers English King provides a meticulous account of Shakespeares philosophy of legitimate rule, contributing to the burgeoning scholarship on Shakespeare as a political thinker and showing yet again that the poet deserves to be placed among the ranks of such political philosophers as Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes. Leon Craig is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Alberta.
Author: Michelle Zerba
File Type: pdf
Michelle Zerba engages current debates about the relationship between literature and theory by analyzing responses of theorists in the Western tradition to tragic conflict. Isolating the centrality of conflict in twentieth-century definitions of tragedy, Professor Zerba discusses the efforts of modern critics to locate in Aristotles Poetics the origins of this focus on agon. Through a study of ethical and political ideas formative of the Poetics, she demonstrates why Aristotle and his Renaissance and Neoclassical beneficiaries exclude conflict from their accounts of tragedy. The agonistic element, the book argues, first emerges in dramatic criticism in nineteenth-century Romantic theories of the sublime and, more influentially, in Hegels lectures on drama and history.This turning point in the history of speculation about tragedy is examined with attention to a dynamic between the systematic aims of theory and the subversive conflicts of tragic plays. In readings of various Classical and Renaissance dramatists, Professor Zerba reveals that strife in tragedy undermines expectations of coherence, closure, and moral stability, on which theory bases its principles of dramatic order. From Aristotle to Hegel, the philosophical interest in securing these principles determines attitudes toward conflict.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Geert Lovink
File Type: pdf
On February 24, 2005 Geert Lovink delivered his inaugural lecture as lector of the Institute of Networkcultures, part of the University of Applied Science of Amsterdam.In this essay he presents ongoing theoretical work, developed throughout 2004, the year he took up the position of lector at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam. He focuses on three conceptual fields the relation between multitude, network and culture, the art of collaboration and free cooperation, and finally presents elements of a theory of organized networks.
Author: John Banville
File Type: epub
Amazon.com ReviewA brilliant, engaging, and highly literate espionage-cum-existential novel, John Banvilles The Untouchable concerns the suddenly-exposed double agent Victor Maskell, a character based on the real Cambridge intellectual elites who famously spied on the United Kingdom in the middle of the 20th century. But Maskell--scholar, adventurer, soldier, art curator, and more--respected and still living in England well past his retirement from espionage, looked like he was going to get away with it when suddenly, in his 70s and sick with cancer, he is unmasked. The question of why, and by whom is not as important for Maskell as the larger question of who finally he himself really is, why he spied in the first place, and whether his many-faceted existence adds up to an authentic life. From Library JournalThe author of such exemplary works as Athena (LJ 5195), Irishman Banville here takes on the juicy challenge of writing a spy novel and handles the assignment with far more grace and intelligence than even the best of that genres authors. Double-agent Victor Maskell wakes up one morning to discover that after years of informing on London for Moscow, someone has informed on him. To sort out what has happened, he begins a journal. What follows is the richly detailed account of a man who clearly had convictions but whose behavior remains an enigma throughout. As he recalls his Irish childhood, complete with pastor father, beloved stepmother, and retarded brother his emotional entanglements with careless golden boy Nick and his sister, Baby, whom Victor quite oddly marries long before he realizes that he is gay and his relations with a slew of hedonistic, upper-class Englishmen too incisively characterized to be mere types, Victor remains subtle, crusty, and tantalizingly out of reach. His story is so well told that why he spied?and who betrayed him?become secondary. Highly recommended.-?Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.