Volume 46, Number 19 · December 2, 1999
Life and Death of a Hero
By Lawrence Weschler
The Man Who Tried to Save the World: The Dangerous Life and Mysterious Disappearanceof Fred Cuny
by Scott Anderson
Doubleday, 374 pp., $24.95
I had dinner with Fred Cuny his last night in New York City—this was mid-week, mid-March 1995, and, as it subsequently turned out, I wasn't the only one who did so. At a memorial meeting in Washington some months later, where mourners seemed to vie with one another in their attempts to coin a telling characterization of Cuny—'the Red Adair of Humanitarian Relief,' 'a postimperial, postcolonial Lawrence of Arabia,' 'the Master of Disaster'—I ran into at least three or four others there who'd had similar meals with him that evening. Indeed, lining up our memories, we were able to puzzle out how he'd loped from one such repast to the next before taking off yet again into the farthest hinterland—or rather his latest, and last, farthest hinterland, for a few weeks later he was killed in Chechnya.
Review, 5661 words
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