Emergency Sex: And Other Desperate Measures

This was a great find in an airport in Kisumu Airport. Tiniest bookstore with some great books! Picked this up for us as my new Kindle didn't down load the books only the titles. As an avid reader with 17 days and 33lbs weight restriction....Sad Day. It is the true story of three UN workers in Haiti, Cambodia and other hot spots in the world. They navagate though their innocence,niavete and need in this new world. Each story changes them and you.

Emergency Sex is an excellent book detailing the failure of the United nations and the United States preventing horrific crimes around the world. All the characters in the book are flawed i.e. they are human, and deal with the situations they are exposed to differently, but the book should not be judged on the basis of the authors having an idealistic view of the world. The book's strengths lie in the complete failures of the United Nations to do anything correctly, and when the so completely fail to take any responsibility for the lack of action. It also points out the complete lack of a foreign policy by the Clinton administration. This is an excellent book. ( )

During the long anticlimax of this book, when all three authors start writing their final reports, Ken summarizes their effort: “Collectively we experienced—maybe represent—all the exultation and catastrophe of a decade spent trying and failing to do well by doing good in a new world.” He and his role model Andrew can’t shake this tragic tone; instead, they use their respective religions to contextualize themselves as martyr heroes in a brutally flawed machine that converts youth, trust and idealism into bureaucracy, buck-passing and corpses.

Heidi, the secretary from New Jersey, regularly criticizes her co-authors for exactly this failing and effectively carries their book with her energy and authenticity. With the exception of maybe four paragraphs of abstracted and awkward love making contributed by the men, Heidi is also responsible for almost all of the “Emergency Sex.” I’m pretty sure there’s a whole incredibly popular genre of tell-all memoires written by sexually liberated women (for sale near the cash register, at the airport). I haven’t read any of these. So, I don’t know if Heidi’s prose is derivative and I was prepared, instead, to find her sections of the book totally refreshing. In the midst of the grim ethical calculations being made by the two male leads, it’s a treat to find Heidi writing:

“I’ll have to act all earnest and somber too and nod my head a lot. I’ll have to ask relevant questions, and the whole time Ken will be nervously waiting for me to use foul language, and when I do, he’ll smile and make that little coughing sound to show everyone he’s disassociating himself from me.”

All of the authors foreground their thoughts about one another and their tendency to rank and rate themselves against their colleagues. This depiction of the credibility culture of hard core aid workers was particularly fun to oversee. “Emergency Sex” is, as the title would suggest, a voyeuristic book. It’s an all access pass to a very exclusive club: board that helicopter, enter that dank secret prison, jump into the mass grave, or kick your daiquiri’s back poolside with the do-gooding jet set.

But amidst this formidable momentum, the book is also polemical. With first-hand experience, Cain and Thomson argue (not originally) that following the U.S. Military casualties in Somalia, both the U.S. and the U.N. failed spectacularly at their mandates and humanitarian objectives and, worse, betrayed the trust of the vulnerable people to whom they promised safety and protection. Their disillusionment at being part of these failures effectively balances the heady self-satisfaction that makes the first part of the book seem like a recruiting advertisement for the UN.

This would be a rewarding book to teach to high school students and it would be easy to read while traveling or on vacation. It is enjoyable but not essential. ( )

created a stirr on a flight back from Uganda... ( )

I picked this book based on some of the reviews here, most readers giving it 5 stars. I found this book quite disappointing; first of to those who say there is not alot of sex in the book- I found that untrue, Heidi's reports (one of the narrator) were 90% on her sexual encounters. This I found quite disturbing, I'm not some nun, but I find the concept of sex and humanitarian aid a bit too much for my taste. As for the UN and how they failed, nothing new there. This book offered too little on life on the field. Except Dr. Andrew's reports and some of Ken's notes, I would not put this book on top of my favorites. For those interested in the subject, I found James Orbinski far more interesting, and I highly recommend his writing (and his documentary 'Triage'). ( )