Deliver Us from Evil

The Cold War has been followed by a decade of regional and ethnic conflicts, massacres, and forced exiles. Should America assume the role of peacekeeper and chief humanitarian in a world of endless wars and human disasters? Eminent foreign correspondent William Shawcross has spent much of his career in war zones and has had unrivaled access to diplomats, peacekeepers, and global policymakers at the highest levels, including UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, for whom he has high regard. In Deliver Us from Evil, which has a new epilogue for the paperback edition, Shawcross takes us behind the lines with him to Cambodia, Bosnia, Somalia, Sierra Leone, East Timor, Rwanda, and Kosovo to show us how complex and costly Western interventions are and how naive are our hopes of peacemaking without bloodshed.

William Shawcross is the author of Sideshow, for which he won the George Polk Award for reporting and the Sidney Hillman Foundation Prize, as well as The Quality of Mercy, The Shah's Last Ride, and Murdoch. He lives in England. Deliver Us from Evil was one of six finalists for the Samuel Johnson Prize, Britain's most prestigious nonfiction award.