If a computer were to design the perfect U.N. Secretary-General, he or she would look something like this: African born; European and American educated, with decades of service in the U.N. system; married to a European; and possessing a quiet charisma and calm authority as chaos swirls.
That the U.N. in 1996 found such a person to restore its sense of direction and purpose was a near miracle. But out of the U.N.'s failures in Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda came Kofi Annan, the career international civil servant who had participated in these disasters yet somehow survived and learned from them....