A Problem from Hell
America and the Age of Genocide
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction
‘A devastating indictment’ SUNDAY TIMES
‘An important book, a superb piece of reporting’ OBSERVER
‘With great narrative verve, and a sober and subtle intelligence, she carries us deep behind the scenes of history-in-the-making’ PHILIP GOUREVITCH
Why do leaders who vow ‘never again’ repeatedly fail to prevent genocide?
In her award-winning modern classic, Samantha Power presents a deeply researched and powerfully argued answer to this haunting question. Disproving claims that successive American leaders were unaware of genocidal horrors occurring around the world, Power tells the stories of courageous individuals who risked their careers and lives in an effort to save others, revealing how policy makers and outsiders alike ignored chilling warnings and rationalised inaction. A riveting account, A Problem From Hell has forever reshaped debates about foreign policy, while inspiring a new generation to raise their voices in the face of contemporary injustice.
Reviews
‘Fascinating. An important book, a superb piece of reporting which cumulatively grows into a major political work, part polemic, part moral philosophy.’ Observer
‘Deeply researched and trenchantly argued. A devastating indictment not just of the American foreign policy establishment but of the country’s entire political class, the media and even the wider public.’ Niall Ferguson, Sunday Times
‘Power is part of an inspiring generation of political thinkers who are academically brilliant but who also know how to write.’ David Hare, Book of the Year, Observer
About the author
Samantha Power founded the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, and is now a faculty affiliate. From 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in Yugoslavia as a reporter for US News and the Economist. A native of Ireland, she moved to the US in 1979 at the age of nine, and graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing examination of 20th-century acts of genocide and U.S responses to them. In clean, unadorned prose, Power revisits the Turkish genocide directed at Armenians in 1915 1916, the Holocaust, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge, Iraqi attacks on Kurdish populations, Rwanda, and Bosnian "ethnic cleansing," and in doing so, argues that U.S. intervention has been shamefully inadequate. The emotional force of Power's argument is carried by moving, sometimes almost unbearable stories of the victims and survivors of such brutality. Her analysis of U.S. politics what she casts as the State Department's unwritten rule that nonaction is better than action with a PR backlash; the Pentagon's unwillingness to see a moral imperative; an isolationist right; a suspicious left and a population unconcerned with distant nations aims to show how ingrained inertia is, even as she argues that the U.S. must reevaluate the principles it applies to foreign policy choices. In the face of firsthand accounts of genocide, invocations of geopolitical considerations and studied and repeated refusals to accept the reality of genocidal campaigns simply fail to convince, she insists. But Power also sees signs that the fight against genocide has made progress. Prominent among those who made a difference are Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who invented the word genocideand who lobbied the U.N. to make genocide the subject of an international treaty, and Senator William Proxmire, who for 19 years spoke every day on the floor of the U.S. Senate to urge the U.S. to ratify the U.N. treaty inspired by Lemkin's work. This is a well-researched and powerful study that is both a history and a call to action. Photos.
