Hammarskjöld: A Life
Killed in the Congo in 1961, the UN secretary-general whom Lipsey profiles was, as the posthumous publication of his private journal, Markings (1964), revealed, profoundly spiritual. In effect interrogating the journal, Lipsey attempts to access Hammarskjöld’s inner consciousness as it interacted with the politics of the Cold War and decolonization. Lipsey is not, therefore, a conventional biographer. He writes more as an interpreter of Hammarskjöld’s quest through the Gospels and the writings of Christian mystics, such as Thomas à Kempis, and assorted non-Christian philosophers. Postulating the meanings of the poems, aphorisms, haiku, and allusive prose passages in Markings, Lipsey presents Hammarskjöld in martyr-like light, as the peacemaker silenced by violence. Lipsey’s main stage for this image is the chaotic Congo of 1960–61, where he depicts a heroic Hammarskjöld leading a substantial UN intervention against a galaxy of malevolent forces that he implicates in Hammarskjöld’s fatal plane crash (investigators blamed pilot error). Valuable as a tribute to Hammarskjöld and his cast of mind, Lipsey’s profile intentionally yields formal biography and international history to previously published works. --Gilbert Taylor