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At the highest levels of international politics, Sergio Vieira de Mello was a legend, described once as "a cross between James Bond and Bobby Kennedy." The Brazilian diplomat spent more than 30 years working for the United Nations, managing crises and moving from one hot spot to even hotter ones.

When he, along with 21 others, was killed in August 2003 by a car-bomb attack on U.N. offices in Baghdad, he was near the top of the U.N. hierarchy. He had evolved from a radical humanitarian activist into a consummate diplomat, willing to work with those who were the lesser among evils.

He preached the importance of the U.N.'s remaining neutral, but his critics said that neutrality was an illusion, because, as Samantha Power observes, "impartial peace-keeping between two unequal sides was its own form of side-taking."

Ms. Power is a former journalist and now a professor at Harvard. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Her portrait of Mr. Vieira de Mello is meticulously researched and balanced.

The book is fascinating on several levels: how a person immersed in horror keeps moving toward the goal of peace, making compromises along the way; how the United Nations works and, quite often, doesn't work; and how passive most of the world remains in the face of humanitarian disasters.

Chasing the Flame, writes Ms. Power, appraises the brightness of "the flame of idealism that motivated many to strive to combat injustice and that inspired the vulnerable to believe that help would soon come." This book is a story of accomplishments, such as Mr. Vieira de Mello's crucial role in the resurrection of East Timor, and also of great failures, such as the U.N.'s deadly betrayal of innocents in Bosnia and Rwanda.

In her chapter about the attack that killed Mr. Vieira de Mello, Ms. Power shifts into a minute-by-minute description of the frantic efforts to save those buried under tons of rubble. It is a gripping, heartbreaking story, particularly because Mr. Vieira de Mello's role in Iraq illustrated the political fragility of the U.N. Officials of the U.S. occupation were openly hostile to the international body, and because the U.N. depends on the support of its member nations, there was no independent muscle that the organization could flex.

Mr. Vieira de Mello tried to change the world and he did – not as much as he wanted, but enough to save some lives and bring glimmers of peace and hope to people who desperately needed both.

Philip Seib is professor of journalism and public diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

Sergio Vieira de Mello

and the Fight to Save the World

Samantha Power

(Penguin, $32.95)

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