Winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award
Presented by the Global Forces in the Post-Cold War World Lecture Series
Tuesday, April 8 / 5 P.M. / Free
UCSB Corwin Pavilion

Reviews:

"Some books elegantly record history; some books make history. This book does both. Power brings a story-teller's gift for gripping narrative together with a reporter's hunger for the inside story. Drawing on newly declassified documents and scores of exclusive interviews, she has produced an unforgettable history of Americans who stood up and stood by in the face of genocide. It is a history of our country that has never before been told, and it should change the way we see America and its role in the world."
-- Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II

"Power gives us the behind-the-scenes story of how and why policy-makers made the decisions they did, and she offers recommendations for improving our individual and collective response. This is a moving account of how millions of lives were lost."
-- Former Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine)

"This is a serious and compelling work, and should be read by policy makers everywhere, before they confront the genocides that are waiting in the wings."
-- Paul M. Kennedy , Dilworth Professor of History and Director, International Security Studies, Yale University

Description:

A character-driven study of some of the darkest moments in our national history, when America failed to prevent or stop 20th-century campaigns to exterminate Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Bosnians, and Rwandans. Drawing upon declassified cables, private papers, exclusive interviews with Washington's top policy-makers, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Samantha Power tells the story of American indifference and American courage in the face of the worst massacres of the twentieth century.

In this masterful work of social history, Power examines how, in the five decades since the Holocaust, Americans have very rarely marshaled their might to stop genocide and mass terror. Indeed, she shows how the U.S. response to recent genocides bears striking resemblance to the American response to reports of Hitler's Final Solution. By paying particular attention to the last thirty years of world carnage, which coincided with the growth of Holocaust awareness in the United States, Power dissects how the historical memory of the Holocaust can co-exist with an American diplomatic and military policy of non-engagement that has resulted in the loss of millions of lives.

With the authority of one who has witnessed such atrocities herself, Power goes on to set a visionary and yet feasible agenda for how the United States might change course to prevent or halt future genocide. A Problem from Hell makes a riveting moral argument for why, as both great power and global citizen, we must renew our vigilance against genocide.

About the Author:

Samantha Power is the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. From 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for U.S. News and World Report and The Economist. In 1996 she worked for the International Crisis Group (ICG) as a political analyst, helping launch the organization in Bosnia. She is a frequent contributor to The New Republic and is the editor, with Graham Allison, of Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact. A native of Ireland, she moved to the United States in 1979 at the age of nine, and graduated from Yale University and Harvard Law School.

The “Global Forces in the Post-Cold War World” Lecture Series is sponsored by UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, UCSB Arts & Lectures, Global and International Studies Program, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. It is being put on in partnership with the Santa Barbara Committee on Foreign Relations, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, PAX 2100, International Studies Association at Santa Barbara City College, and the International Studies Program at Ventura College. This event is also cosponsored by UCSB Office of Community Relations and UCSB Affiliates.

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