A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide

In her award-winning interrogation of the last century of American history, Samantha Power — a former Balkan war correspondent and founding executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy — asks the haunting question: Why do American leaders who vow “never again” repeatedly fail to stop genocide? Drawing upon exclusive interviews with Washington’s top policy makers, access to newly declassified documents, and her own reporting from the modern killing fields, Power provides the answer in “A Problem from Hell,” a groundbreaking work that tells the stories of the courageous Americans who risked their careers and lives in an effort to get the United States to act.

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.