I have a lot of complaints and very few positive remarks about this book. I'll start with the little good: I enjoyed the biographical information about Raphael Lemkin. That said, there are many other more in-depth books about him out there that could tell an even fuller story.The majority of this book, however, was a hollow argument for the superiority of liberal interventionism. The structure of each case study goes like this: a genocide started; the US MAY have borne some blame for the conditions that allowed the violence to start; the US didn't intervene; OR the US did intervene and everything went great. The historical background for all the genocides is superficial at best. For example, Power never even addresses the issue of how the Hutu and Tutsi identities came into being in Rwanda. She mentions that there was some animosity based on the structure of the colonial administration and not much else. I understand that the majority of this book was dedicated to the American response to genocides throughout history, but not properly contextualizing the situation is at best a mistake and at worst a deliberate attempt to strengthen an argument. I was amazed that this book was so long, given how little detail she put into the case studies. Most importantly, though, I think this book operates from an inherently false and dangerous premise. The basic assumption from which the whole book flows is that the US is a world superpower (true) and has the means to stop violence around the world (also true). Few people can dispute those two facts. And yes, the US should make as many efforts as possible to stop violence, especially genocide, around the world. But the US is also one of the leading causes of violence around the world. From Chile in the 1970s to Iraq in the 2000s, the US has been responsible for high levels of violence and human rights abuse. Power doesn't even mention these points, instead focusing on how the US could have stopped other states who were killing people. Presenting only this half of the coin is to portray the US as a state that just hasn't done enough a couple of times to stop these huge acts of violence committed by other states.That is the danger of this book's premise: propagating the idea that the American government is just a bystander that failed to act, and not a primary source of death and murder. The cases Power points to are correctly labeled as examples of American failure and shame. The US could and should have done more to stop the Rwandan genocide and many others like it. But the US also should not have led the overthrow of many democratically elected governments and inserted strongmen who oppressed and murdered their own citizens (Pinochet and Mobutu, to name two). Not pointing out both of these faults in American foreign policy is, again, either intellectually lazy or worse.

Samantha Power's 'A Problem from Hell' is a broad attempt to document the major acts of genocide/human rights violations of the 20th century paired with the international community's subsequent negligence in each case. She reports on the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and especially her major areas of research- Rwanda and Serbia. However, Powers is content to simply recount major instances of crimes against humanity that the U.S. and other major Western powers simply ignored (a worthy historical task), rather than to document the major atrocities the U.S. supported/participated in (the far more morally serious and honest task). While she is scrupulous in her documentation of the horrors of Rwanda and Iraq, her sections on Indo-China fail miserably. She provides a lengthy and conventional chapter on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, without mentioning to inform us about the U.S.'s massive contribution to such atrocities (only side references are provided). Additionally, she mentions in a rather depraved manner, that "In 1975, when its ally, the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away" (147). In actuality, the U.S. did not look away: it funded the genocide, and President Carter deliberately escalated the intensity of the atrocities. This is the essence of Power's political backwardness. Pointing to the atrocities of official enemies is easy, it is far more difficult and necessary to point to the atrocities of the U.S. and its allies. Nowhere does Powers discuss Israel and the Palestinians, nowhere does she discuss Pinochet, or the Contras, or Kissinger for that matter. So long as the the liberal intelligentsia refuses to stare in the mirror, the world will continue to be an arena of exploitation, injustice, and crimes against humanity.

Grinding, grueling, exhausting account of a series of genocides and the United States's response or generally lack thereof.Other people have criticized this book at length for failing to address the ways the United States was actively complicit in genocidal violence through support of its perpetrators. The criticism is accurate, though I think it's a product of the focus of this book very specifically on passive complicity.I had read excerpts of this over the years, and I'm glad I finally sat down and went through all of it, cover-to-cover. But this is a first generation book, and now I want the fifth generation, or the seventh generation, if you know what I mean. Because Power spends a lot of time documenting American disinterest in mass death, and some time talking about the reasons, but the reasons are very . . . cerebral. This economic interest, that political exigency, a few general comments about racism.This book made me think a lot about pain, and being the observer of it. I mean, most of us catch glimpses of indescribable anguish out of the corners of our eyes all the time, but we've developed defensive emotional blinders. But once in a while, someone looks at the newspaper headline that ten thousand other people read and forgot, and that one person is seared. Irrevocably changed just by knowing that five thousand people halfway around the world were "disappeared." I've known some people like that, and worked with them. One of them was the first person to make me read excerpts of this book.I want the book about those people. And the contextual, psychological, physiological, etc. differences between them and the rest of us. And the book that takes a deeper, more honest look at the psychology of passive complicity, not just its economic logic. Because Power wrote mostly about when and where and who, and left me pretty messed up over why.