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Samantha Power's memoir traces a remarkable arc - from an Irish childhood in Dublin, through the bloodied streets of wartime Bosnia, to the polished corridors of the White House and the United Nations. It is a book that manages to be both a gripping personal story and a serious meditation on whether idealism can survive contact with power.

The early chapters are among the strongest. Power writes with real warmth about her upbringing in Ireland, Pittsburgh and Atlanta, and she is especially affecting when recounting several traumatic episodes from her youth - her parents' painful separation, the family's emigration, and her gradual awakening to a world beyond sport and school. Her transformation from college athlete to war correspondent covering the Balkans in the 1990s feels genuinely urgent, and her account of witnessing ethnic cleansing first-hand explains everything that followed in her career. It was this humanitarian impulse, forged during those early years in Bosnia, that drove her Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell and ultimately brought her to the attention of a young senator named Barack Obama.

Where the memoir really earns its title is in Power's honest reckoning with the gap between advocacy and governance. She acknowledges that the officials she once criticised as an activist were operating under far more complex pressures and constraints than she had allowed for. The transition from firebrand outsider to insider - first as Obama's human rights adviser on the National Security Council, then as the youngest-ever US Ambassador to the UN - is handled with disarming candour. She does not shy away from the administration's failures, including Obama's broken promise to recognise the Armenian genocide and the agonising indecision over Syria. The book is filled with half-measures, disappointments and bureaucratic defeats, making it a far cry from the typical autobiographical victory tour.

That said, the book is not without flaws. At over 550 pages, it can feel overstretched. Some passages read as extended justifications for decisions - or non-decisions - particularly around Syria and the limits of American intervention. There is a tension between Power's admirable personal honesty and a certain discretion about broader US foreign policy that occasionally undermines the depth of her analysis. She chose loyalty to the administration over the kind of full-throated critique her younger self might have demanded, and while that is an understandable choice, it leaves certain chapters feeling incomplete.

What rescues the book from these weaker stretches is Power's sheer force of personality on the page. The memoir is suffused with humour - Obama himself furnishes some of the funniest anecdotes - and the love story with Cass Sunstein provides a genuinely sweet counterpoint to the stresses of political life. Her accounts of juggling motherhood with round-the-clock diplomacy are funny, self-deprecating and refreshingly unglamorous.

The memoir ultimately shows an idealist who has acquired realistic expectations for what governments and policymakers can actually achieve - someone who learned that incremental progress, fought for stubbornly and at great personal cost, may be the most any individual can hope to accomplish. It is not a comfortable conclusion, but it is an honest one, and it makes The Education of an Idealist one of the more rewarding political memoirs of recent years.