dispatches

Samantha Power /

Samantha Power, an Irish-born savant without borders, looks at the world from every which way. As a Harvard professor, she is an academic. She is an author, an essayist with a weekly column in Time, and a political analyst. But hard reporting takes her regularly into distant realities, from Darfur to Davos.

She won a 2003 Pulitzer Prize for her book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which gave human dimensions to a scourge too often seen in the abstract. Her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, looks at how sensible, dedicated people can blunt humanitarian disaster.

Power began reporting in Bosnia, right out of university, a red-haired beauty who dazzled jaded old hands with an attractive combination of fearless brilliance and a natural way of putting everyone at ease. Her colleagues agreed that she would be a Secretary of State one day and, had she been born American, perhaps President. Then again, one close friend observed, she is too honest for that.