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'). ( )

Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures (subtitled: A True Story From Hell on Earth) is not a long book, by my standards, but I didn't know if I could finish it. I couldn't put it down, and I couldn't keep on reading. I couldn't pick it up, and I couldn't stop until the end. It took me a week to finish it, but now I think I will never be finished with it.

What do you get if you take a doctor, a lawyer and recently divorced secretary and put them together in the middle of worst atrocities of the late twentieth century? No, that is not the start of a joke, it is how Emergency Sex came to be written by three of the most idealistic, courageous, tenacious, compassionate and brutally honest people I have ever encountered.

Not that they trumpet their virtues, indeed, the opposite. Ironically, in revealing what they perceive as their failings and faults, they reveal more than they know, and only their iron standards keep them from seeing what any reader can perceive - ordinary people in extraordinary situations doing the work of saints and angels while reviling themselves for not achieving better results.

They all worked for the United Nations, and between them, jointly or individually, worked in every hell that the '90's had to offer: Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, Liberia - if there was a place on earth where man's cruelty and inhumanity bloomed, the United Nations sent them there, to heal, to guard, to document the atrocities. In the process, they lose friends and companions in the violence, they lose their naivete, they lose their youth, and occasionally come close to losing their minds. But what civilized person could endure what they experienced and remain the same as before? I could not even read about it and remain the same.

Do not read this book if you want to be entertained and not think too deeply about our world today. Do not read this book if you want to keep the opinions you already have formed on the United Nations and the work they do.

The authors shed light on the proximate reasons for Srebrenica and other horror stories, but they leave it to the reader to form their own conclusions about what should have, could have been done instead. Like the stories they tell, my conclusions are layered and nuanced, but one thing I believe - we could not afford isolationism in the time of Woodrow Wilson, and we cannot afford it now.

We all live together on a small blue marble isolated in the vastness of empty space, and what affects one country affects all of us eventually, whether it is pollution and global warming or poisoning the air and water with ruthless manufacturing, or an arms race that spreads volatile weapons and death throughout the planet.

I like books with happy endings, and the lives of Andrew, Ken and Heidi prove that hope overcomes fear, compassion overcomes hate and truth is more powerful than lies. In this book, that will have to be a happy enough ending for me. ( )

This is a rough read, but it's worth it. The authors take you through their time in various war-zones of the 90s where they landed through their positions with the UN as volunteers. Readers are exposed to conditions in Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Liberia, with afterthoughts given from the U.S. once they returned around 1999. The unlikely friendship of a doctor, a law student, and a social worker turned secretary carries the book through all of these settings. It is not needlessly graphic or given to propoganda. In fact, as you find in the afterward, the authors angered the UN with the book's publication specifically because of their blunt honesty and regularly given opinions on whatever situations were at hand. Honesty also comes across when they account for their own weaknesses and fears, so that more than anything a reader is met with their humanity and their ordinariness as U.S. citizens, that yet led them to help so many and makes their accounts all the more powerful. You can read this book in sections, alongside others, and it goes more quickly than you expect. It is inspiring as well as educational, and worth looking into. Highly Recommended. ( )

Summary: This book is a memoir of the three authors' time spent on various UN peacekeeping missions in the 1990s, formatted as short, overlapping sections from each point of view. The three met in Cambodia, organizing the country's first democratic elections, and were later posted to missions in Haiti, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Liberia. This book works on several levels: first, as an eyewitness account of what it was really like "on the ground" during events that most people only heard snippets of on the news. However, it's also a frank discussion of the repercussions of UN and US policy; an elegy for lost idealism, both personal and national; and a confession of the lengths that people will go to to maintain their sanity and their souls when faced with some of the worst possible examples of human evil.

Review: This book blew me away. Even though the opening admits that the book includes "all the subjective distortions and revisions we told ourselves, our friends, and our bosses", I have never read a more brutally honest and vivid memoir. This book is fairly dark - not only due to the subject matter of the atrocities it describes - but also because it doesn't shy away from laying bare the less-pleasant sides of its narrators. Thoughts about sex, violence, hatred, depression, the loss of hope and faith, power, and all of the things everyone experiences to some degree, all are magnified for the authors by the crisis situations of some of the worst places on Earth, and all are exposed for the sake of the reader. The result is a book that presents international politics in the '90s in an incredibly vivid, personal, and moving way - an important piece that was missing for most of us who only caught the 30-second snippets on CNN. The title is a little sensational - if you're looking for sex and scandal you'll probably be disappointed, although after finishing, I think the title fits the book perfectly. I'm not a big non-fiction reader, and politics and recent history/current events are not particular interests, but this book is a clear exception - it managed to give face and voice to the headlines, and really made me stop to think about peace, war, human brutality, and what our role is and should be.

Recommendation: Highly recommended for just about everyone, whether or not you like non-fiction, memoirs, or recent political history (maybe particularly if not). ( )

I picked this book up on the recommendation of a friend of mine who's worked in Afghanistan and Darfur. She quoted me the book's description of aid workers as "missionaries, mercenaries and madmen", and was amazed that I'd never heard of it - it had made the rounds of everyone she knew in the aid sector. Because of that, the book's title, and my friend's own tales of sex, lies and incoming mortar fire in the field, I was expecting a smut'n'soldiers romp - bright young things, living crazy lives, heightened by the presence of borrowed violence. That's not what I got. Well, not entirely.

This book is a joint memoir of 12 years in the lives of three young UN workers - from their first, vicariously exciting experiences in "just dangerous enough" Cambodia, through incompetent bosses, mission failures, and the loss of friends, to eventual burnout. A note to the reader warns, "The work is derived from our official memos, personal diaries, letters home, and memories ... These pages therefore include all the subjective distortions and revisions we told ourselves, our friends, and our bosses." That should give you a flavour of the style - witty, knowing, and self-aware.

The format - it's told chronologically, with the three stories interleaved - works well. It feels as if you are getting to know the three over drinks, hearing various anecdotes over the course of the years. You build up your image of each person's personality from remarks made by the other two. And the authors manage to convey the innocence, or naivety, of their early years in the business, without contamination from the later cynicism. (I did suspect, though, that the benefit of hindsight made the younger selves a lot more self-aware, and less annoying, than they would have been if you'd met them at the time!)

What there isn't space for is a lot of analysis - about the rightness of military-backed humanitarian interventions, or about the pressures that create the heightened "work hard, play harder" lifestyle among young Western aid workers. It reads the way the life is lived - one day, you are trying to protect a human rights activist, the next night you are "foreign and free and obnoxious and have dollars, so stay out of our way. We're immortal and nothing can touch us."

Let me be clear - that's not a criticism. Look elsewhere for the moral philosophy - this book, with its dramatisation of the way that policy decisions affect real people's lives, provides essential context for the theory.

As for the lifestyles, the book fits a trend I have noticed in the portrayal of people like aid workers, UN staff and journalists who work in the most difficult circumstances. Instead of being seen as pure-hearted seekers after truth, there is increasing acknowledgement that these are normal people, with human flaws, who have selfish as well as idealistic reasons for doing what they do - making lives better, escaping the ordinary, being proud of their own toughness and ability to cope with horror ... but there is also increasing acknowledgement of the psychological costs of these extreme environments. (Examples of this trend would be any article about Marla Ruzicka, or Aidan Hartley's The Zanzibar Chest - a memoir of a journalist who has worked in Somalia and Rwanda, among others, and how his initial tough and arrogant personality is affected by the terrible things he sees.)

Ultimately, despite the difficulties they face, their criticisms of the UN system, and the sense of frustration the authors have about their own failure to make an impact, the book is still positive about the importance of engagement, about trying to make a difference. Early on in the book, Andrew, the most idealistic of the three, complains, "Many of my French friends feign weary resignation whenever violence erupts, but that attitude was picked up on the cheap in some smoke-filled cafe. They haven't ever struggled and failed, haven't earned their cynicism." And yet, despite the fact that much of the book is about struggling and failing, it still ends with a plea for the importance of idealism: "If maturity means becoming a cynic ... is it not better to die young but with your humanity intact? If everyone resigns themselves to cynicism, isn't that exactly how vulnerable millions end up dead?" ( )