A Life in Peace and War Book

British diplomat Brian Uruqhart was one of the team that founded the United Nations, and his book takes us through his childhood years; WWII, when he fought in a British airborne division (although in his retelling "fought" sounds an awful lot like bumbling around and waiting for the Americans to show up, to be honest), to the early years of the UN; and his eventual retirement. He had an amazing perch from which to watch world events unfold in the latter half of the 20th century, and he knew many of its most important figures (I've walked past the State Department's Ralph Bunche library but never knew who he was - hes one of the most interesting characters in the book). The book is strongest in its first half - he is meditative (in a British kind of way) about his childhood years and his absent father and difficult mother, and his descriptions of British public (i.e. private) school and Oxford are rich and evocative. I am fairly to strongly cynical regarding the UN, so it was interesting to read his recounting of the thinking at the time the UN was created (pages 90-97 in particular are an excellent encapsulation of what the UN was supposed to be and do). It is a compelling concept of course, but the fatal flaw seems to have been the assumption that the consensus among the great powers that had to some degree marked the WWII period would continue. Of course it didnt, and the Security Council (and therefore much of the UN's early work) was almost immediately polarized between the US and the Soviet Union. I am very sympathetic to his exasperation about members states' schizophrenia regarding the UN ("do more!" "do less!") and the expectation that somehow the UN - which is not after all an independent body - will somehow solve problems that the great powers cannot solve themselves. The second half takes us through the various crises the UN faced and that Uruqhart was personally involved in over the next two decades - its basically Middle East crisis, stalemate in Cyprus, another Middle East crisis, some more interminable and pointless logjam in Cyprus, etc etc. There are a couple crises in Congo and Namibia thrown in to mix things up. It gets a little repetitive, partly because I'm not especially interested in the parts of the world he focuses on, and partly because the mechanics of UN peacekeeping are a bit boring. One of the incredible things about the book is the amount of detail he remembers - what was served at a lunch 20 years prior, the make of car that picked him up at the airport, etc. I can barely remember someone's name when they've just told it to me, and the sum total of my recall of 1998 is that I was in China. In fact, these book reviews are a memory exercise for me, prompted by the fact that I once told someone that Watership Down is one of my favorite books and they asked me to explain it and all I could say was, "Its about rabbits." Anyway, I cant say I've read widely on the UN as an organization, but I'd hazard a guess that this is one of if not the best out there - Urquhart is a treasure trove of interesting historical anecdotes, and he is a fair-minded critic of both the strengths and weaknesses of the UN and its role in the world (and importantly, the way its member states have managed to undermine its original purpose).