A Problem from Hell won a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. “We even – we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility,” its epigraph quoted Abraham Lincoln. The book excoriated the United States for its inaction to protect the victims of ethnic cleansings throughout the twentieth century. During her time at Harvard, Power began working on a paper highlighting United States foreign policy in light of modern-day genocides, which eventually turned into A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
RARIFY WOUNDED HEART FULL
It’s an illuminating, poignant, and slightly wry look at a young woman struggling to make sense of her role in a world full of both atrocities and privilege.Īs the book goes on, it becomes clear that to engage in politics is to die a thousand little deaths of principles and priorities. When she ran the 1995 New York City Marathon, Power wrote on her shirt “REMEMBER SREBRENICA.” Then on the back for good measure she added: “8,000 BOSNIAN MEN AND BOYS, MURDERED JULY 12-13, 1995.” She remembers the confused crowds of onlookers who gathered to shout supportive messages to the runners, some cheering her on simply as “remember” because they couldn’t pronounce Srebrenica. Back from the field, she was troubled by the widespread indifference to the genocide and lack of media coverage. After her years reporting on the Bosnian conflict, she returned to the United States and pursued a law degree from Harvard. These early years set up her career and give the most insight into her inner world, or early ethical imperatives. Fresh out of Yale, she found herself working as a journalist in Bosnia, trying very hard to make Americans care about the genocide happening in front of her eyes. In college she slowly became aware of world events and history. She starts at the very beginning, growing up in Ireland and emigrating to the United States with her mother at the age of nine, leaving behind her alcoholic father who eventually died (in her mind, due to a broken heart that she left him).
Instead, The Education of An Idealist reads more like a play by play of Power’s career as it intersects with the Obama years, a sort of half-time party and assessment before she starts the next phase of her life in the halls of power.Įven so, the glimpses one gets into her inner world and inner idealist are compelling. Unfortunately, the title does not deliver on its tantalizing promise. As a trampled-down idealist, as a woman with heady thoughts of ending all war and suffering and trauma and genocide on earth, as a young girl who tried to savor her McDonald’s french fries slowly while thinking of the children starving in Ethiopia from the famine she kept seeing on the five o’clock news, as an erstwhile young conservative who proudly wrote a long paper on why the Just War theory was not compatible with Christianity and thereby troubled all her teachers and classmates, I would seem to be a perfect candidate to read Samantha Power’s new memoir.
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