Emergency Sex

I just finished Emergency Sex by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson. OK, it was the title that first caught my eye (at Borders - it was in the Travel section). It's a triple memoir by three UN workers who worked in all the 1990's hot spots -- Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Liberia. There are chilling descriptions of the genocides and atrocities in Rwanda, Bosnia and Liberia.

This book changed how I see US (and world community) intervention -- the authors see it as almost purely positive. They are bitterly critical of the American decision to precipitately leave Somalia and not to intervene in Rwanda, and credit our interventions in Haiti and Bosnia with doing a lot of good. The overall tenor of the reporting in the American media is "we always screw things up." It's interesting to hear another view from people who saw these events first hand.

I don't want to give the impression that Emergency Sex is a dry political tract. It's a personal memoir of three friends. Their time in Cambodia, the book's first section, is recalled as almost an idyll, with just a little violence to spice things up.

An afterword talks about the controversy attending the book's hardcover publication. The book reveals UN officials taking kickbacks. The two authors who still worked at the UN were threatened with dismissal; they sued and got their jobs back.

Highly recommended.