Published in 2019
592 pages
Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, writer, and academic. She is affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, holding the position of Anna Lindh Professor of Practice of Global Leadership and Public Policy.
A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School, she moved to the United States from Ireland at the age of nine. From 1993 to 1996 she covered the wars in the former Yugoslavia as a reporter for the U.S. News and World Report, the Boston Globe, and The New Republic. In 2003, Power won the Pulitzer Prize for her work “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide. She has contributed reporting to the Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. She spent 2005 to 2006 working in the office of Senator Barack Obama, then served as the Director of Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council. She is currently the United States Ambassador to the United Nations in New York.
What is this book about?
Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, widely known as a relentless advocate for promoting human rights, has been heralded by President Barack Obama as one of America’s “foremost thinkers on foreign policy.”
In her memoir, Power offers an urgent response to the question “What can one person do?”—and a call for a clearer eye, a kinder heart, and a more open and civil hand in our politics and daily lives. The Education of an Idealist traces Power’s distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to presidential Cabinet official. In 2005, her critiques of US foreign policy caught the eye of newly elected senator Barack Obama, who invited her to work with him on Capitol Hill and then on his presidential campaign. After Obama was elected president, Power went from being an activist outsider to a government insider, navigating the halls of power while trying to put her ideals into practice. She served for four years as Obama’s human rights adviser, and in 2013, he named her US Ambassador to the United Nations, the youngest American to assume the role.
A Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, Power transports us from her childhood in Dublin to the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the White House Situation Room and the world of high-stakes diplomacy. The Education of an Idealist lays bare the battles and defining moments of her life and shows how she juggled the demands of a 24/7 national security job with the challenge of raising two young children. Along the way, she illuminates the intricacies of politics and geopolitics, reminding us how the United States can lead in the world, and why we each have the opportunity to advance the cause of human dignity.
