How do you go from journalists to author to activist to ambassador? Samantha Power talks

about her new memoir, The Education of an Idealist.

And how do you write a series of dark crime fiction set in a tiny town in Wyoming? Craig

Johnson will be here to talk about his latest in the Longmire series, Land of Wolves.

Plus, we'll talk about what we and the wider world are reading. This is the Book Review

podcast from the New York Times. I'm Pamela Paul.

Samantha Power joins us now. Her new book is a memoir called The Education of an Idealist.

Samantha, thanks for being here.

So happy to be here.

This is your fifth book in a way you've edited two books written three, but your first

memoir, which is obviously a very different thing. Why write a memoir now?

It was a different thing. It was an immensely challenging thing. All books were challenging

in their own various dysfunctional ways. But this seemed to me the best way to open up

a world that I think has become too cloistered to inside baseball with foreign policy people

talking to each other, government people talking to each other. And because I had the luxury

of having started my career as a writer and then become a diplomat in a government official,

rather than being a government official and then trying to learn to write in order to

describe what had happened. I thought, maybe I can pull this off and just tell a really

good story where people are swept along with the story. But as they go, they then

understand the human rights crisis in the world, the refugee crisis in the world, and

much more importantly, what one individual can do to try to deal with some of these issues.

But I have to say being Irish in our family, we repeated an old Irish saying, which is that

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