Power calls genocide a problem from hell. Why do we as a nation, and a nation of politicians, look away when we see it happening, ignore its consequences, ignore and placate the monsters who perpetrate it? And what can be done about it? All questions explored in this work by a passionate explorer. ( )

It's well written and very well researched, but the book is clouded by Power's intense campaigning for military intervention in a way that just doesn't align with reality. For how often it gets said, America being 'the world's policeman' is neither something good nor something to strive towards. The amplification of that type of thinking and hubris, especially after the failures of the War on Terror, is just downright dangerous. This is a good read if taken as a historical account of American policy in regards to genocide, but the author's personal opinions are better being ignored.

For what its worth, this was published in 2002. It's possible the author's views have since changed given the actions the United States took these past two decades. ( )

This Pulitzer Prize winning book is mainly a political history of the US response to the principal acts of genocide in the 20th century; the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, Saddam Hussein’s attack against the Iraqi Kurds, the Serbian attack against the Bosnian Muslims, the Rwandan Hutu attack against the Tutsis, and finally the specific events in Srebrenica and Kosovo. An overall summary would be that in almost all cases the United States did nothing, actively avoided doing anything, and in at least several cases made things worse e.g., when we demanded that UN peacekeeping forces be removed from Rwanda during the genocide. But there is much more here, of course, including explanations of why it is so difficult to interfere in an ongoing genocide, analyses of the various types of sophistry used to explain one’s failure to aid the persecuted, an excellent biographical discussion of the work of Raphael Lemkin (that I found more insightful than an actual biography of Raphael Lemkin that I have read), and, lest we abandon all hope, encouraging discussions of those who tried to help e.g., Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire, Former Ambassador to Croatia and Diplomat Peter Galbraith, and Canadian Major General of UNAMIR Roméo Dallaire.

The author was a war correspondent and one of Obama’s ambassadors to the UN. She is now the head of AID for President Biden. I don’t know anything about her except the contents of this book; it suggests that she is unusually well qualified.

Also, I enjoyed the quote from David Rieff, that based on our subsequent actions the slogan Never again! might be best defined as Never again would Germans be permitted to kill Jews in Europe in the 1940s. ( )

Ugh. Deep journalism and sledgehammer history. If you want to see America's (lack of) response over and over and over again to genocide across the globe, read this one. It's not easy to read because it's not a pretty picture. ( )

This book is not for the faint-at-heart. And it's best read when one has the stomach for human tragedy. That said, this is one of the most important books I've read in a very long time. The author, Samantha Power, is the current US Ambassador to the United Nations.

This is a clear-eyed and impassioned view of some of the 20th Century's most horrific events - those that have cleared the definition of genocide in international law. That story is in itself a tragedy of unspeakable proportions.

The book is doubly tragic by framing its narrative around the quixotic figures who did what they could against evil - Raphael Lemkin, who fought tirelessly to get the UN Genocide Convention adopted, and died penniless and broken. Senator William Proxmire (D-WI), who stood on the floor of the US Senate every day that it was in session and spoke out to get the US to ratify the Convention (over 3,000 speeches). State Department field officers who put their careers on the line - sometimes destroying those careers entirely - by speaking out about the killings in Cambodia or the genocide against the Kurds in Iraq in the late 1980s. The generals who led UN peacekeeping missions and who were marginalized for demanding the troops and the rules of engagement that would allow them to stop the killing.

Thank you, Raphael Lemkin. Thank you Peter Galbraith. Thank you Romeo Dallaire. Thank you General Wesley Clark. Thank you Richard Holbrooke. I'll end with a quote from Holbrooke: "If we had bombed those f**kers, as I recommended, Srebrenica would not have happened." ( )