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A review by notsayingrevolutionbut
A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power
3.0
I started reading this book having no idea what I was getting into. I knew ashamedly little about America's foreign policy post-WWII and I was woefully unprepared for the level of detail that Power presents. So fair warning, I am not going to be a very good reviewer because this was the first time I learned the details of (or even heard of, in some instances) genocides other than the Holocaust. They don't teach these things in school, don't cast light on the profound ways that America has failed to live up to our pledges of "never again."
And yes, this book was very hard to get through. Dense and detailed, it is stuffed with names and facts and figures that are painstaking at best. By the middle of it, though, I felt an almost moral obligation to finish. What does it say about me if I cannot even finish a 500 page book about the suffering and slaughter of millions of people? Can I not even afford a sliver of my time to understand the pain of others? That is a hard thing and that means this book isn't easy reading. It's not the kind of thing you can pick up and put down, like a novel or a pretty packet of essays. It's hard and it's gonna suck, but once you're in, you're in.
All that being said, I will carry Power's spirit of criticism and dissent into her own work. This book is primarily designed for people who are intimately acquainted with the politics of the Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Balkans, Iraq, did I mention the Balkans? There is a clear lack of balance in her research across the regions, visible most obviously in the page count given to the various genocides. She references numerous political situations and international US involvements that are confusing and that fail to support her points (for example, she repeatedly references the policymakers' bias against repeating "what happened in Somalia" but never gives a clear picture of what that is).
This is an imperfect view of very complicated, very messy issues and even a book of this size and level of detail ultimately fails to do them justice.
And yes, this book was very hard to get through. Dense and detailed, it is stuffed with names and facts and figures that are painstaking at best. By the middle of it, though, I felt an almost moral obligation to finish. What does it say about me if I cannot even finish a 500 page book about the suffering and slaughter of millions of people? Can I not even afford a sliver of my time to understand the pain of others? That is a hard thing and that means this book isn't easy reading. It's not the kind of thing you can pick up and put down, like a novel or a pretty packet of essays. It's hard and it's gonna suck, but once you're in, you're in.
All that being said, I will carry Power's spirit of criticism and dissent into her own work. This book is primarily designed for people who are intimately acquainted with the politics of the Balkans, Rwanda, Cambodia, the Balkans, Iraq, did I mention the Balkans? There is a clear lack of balance in her research across the regions, visible most obviously in the page count given to the various genocides. She references numerous political situations and international US involvements that are confusing and that fail to support her points (for example, she repeatedly references the policymakers' bias against repeating "what happened in Somalia" but never gives a clear picture of what that is).
This is an imperfect view of very complicated, very messy issues and even a book of this size and level of detail ultimately fails to do them justice.