"A Problem from Hell" — Book Summary & Review

Samantha Power builds her argument around a grim pattern she names and repeatedly tests: American leaders promise “never again,” then fail to translate that vow into action—because of ignorance, indifference, and, above all, a failure of imagination. Power structures A Problem from Hell as a suspenseful, evidence-stacked account that alternates between Washington decision-making and the lived reality of mass killing, and she keeps returning to declassified documents and interviews to show how policy talk collapses when genocide becomes “inconvenient” or abstract. In the chapter on Rwanda, she traces how U.S. officials struggled to interpret what they were seeing—treating atrocities as background noise rather than a named, urgent crime—until the window for intervention narrowed into irrelevance. In the section Power calls out as a study of “the problem of imagination,” she dissects why policymakers default to familiar scripts: they look for certainty, wait for consensus, or hide behind diplomatic caution, even when early warnings are abundant. What makes Power’s method sting is that she doesn’t let readers hide behind generic cynicism; she pins blame to specific failures in how leaders frame information, assign responsibility, and imagine consequences.

Her most frustrating limitation is also her strength: the book is less interested in offering a neat moral manual for how to fix U.S. policy than in prosecuting the history of why it went wrong, and that means readers wanting practical “what to do Monday morning” reforms may feel stalled. If you want a broad, world-spanning survey of every genocide in the twentieth century, you won’t get that either; Power’s focus is the American decision process and its recurring blindness, not a comprehensive accounting of global atrocity.