Product Description

It's the early 1990s and three young people are looking to change their lives, and perhaps also the world. Attracted to the ambitious global peacekeeping work of the UN, Andrew, Ken and Heidi's paths cross in Cambodia, from where their fates are to become inextricably bound.Over the coming years, their stories interweave through countries such as Rwanda, Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - war-torn, lawless places where the intervention of the UN is needed like nowhere else. Driven by idealism, the three struggle to do the best they can, caught up in an increasingly tangled web of bureaucracy and ineffectual leadership. As disillusionment sets in, they attempt to keep hold of their humanity through black humour, revelry and 'emergency sex'. Brutal and moving in equal measure, Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures) explores pressing global issues while never losing a sense of the personal. Deeply critical of the West's indifference to developing countries and the UN's repeated failure to intervene decisively, the book provoked massive controversy on its initial publication. Kofi Annan called for the book to be banned, and debate was sparked about the future direction of the UN. Brilliantly written and mordantly funny, it is a book that continues to make waves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8200 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
"* 'For decades, television has been looking for another, more modern M.A.S.H., the comedy series set in an American army field hospital that drew the sting from death and war. Maybe this book is it. In these True Stories from a War Zone, it's the early 1990s and three young, good-looking civilians working for the UN and the Red Cross first meet in Cambodia... These three voices from the world's front line are personal, these three characters from global ground zero are fallible; their youth and idealism, faults and failures, and triumphs and tears, all work to humanise recent history and bring it home for a reckoning' - The Times * '...vividly told, this book is all the more engaging because its perspective is personal before it is political' - Daily Mail"

Newsweek
This engaging account... may also be a great recruiting tool. The motto: See Life, See Death, Have Sex

Publisher’s Weekly
Infuriating, heart-wrenching and well written

Customer Reviews

a massively important work
i don't know what they teach in schools these days about genocide... when i was at school it was all how the holocaust was the darkest point in human history and how we should all learn from it, and how it could never happen again in these more civilised times... and i believed them.

This is the brutally honest account of three young idealistic UN workers who naively set out to make the world a better place in the 90s, drinking and partying they start off overseeing the first democratic elections in Cambodia, and end up confronting some of the worst horrors imaginable.

Well written and effective, with currents of dark wit... taking in places such as Bosnia, Rwanda and Liberia it pulls no punches in criticising 90s US foreign policy and the bureaucracy and failing of the United Nations.
It unflinchinly chronicles the failure of the west to stop preventable genocide.

Stories like this from the ground level, from people who were there, need to be told. A hugely important book.

it's easy to say 'never again' from our western comfort, but what's happening in Darfur now?

Please read this book
I implore everyone to read this book which details the horrendously corrupt ineffectuality of the United Nations who stood by when massacres were taking place in Rwanda, Srebenica and Darfur.
One of the co-authors, Dr Andrew Thomson, wrote a line in the book that has led to his dismissal, as reported recently in the Sunday Observer by Andrew Thomson (another of the book's authors), Thomson was lamenting UN negligence in failing Bosnian Muslims who it had promised to protect in its 'safe area' of Srebrenica where 8,000 men lost their lives. Thomson wrote, 'If blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers show up in your town or village and offer to protect you, run. Or else get weapons. Your lives are worth so much less than theirs.'
The UN leader Kofi Annan has had an easy ride from Left wing liberals who read constant uncritical accounts of his leadership in progressive newspapers like the Guardian. It is the job of the concerned and the commited of the left to construct real critiques of the UN before the right wing in America and England come to colonise the moral high ground on this issue.
Despite being reigned in by the dictats of the security council Annan has personally overseen the systematic corruption of his organisation in oil for food and sex for food scandals.
In a recent article Cain tells of his trip to the Rwanda genocide museum in Kigali where there is a reproduction of the infamous fax sent by UN commander General Romeo Dallaire imploring the then head of UN peacekeeping, Annan, for authority to defend civilians being slaughtered in their thousands. The museum also reproduces Annan's response, ordering only the defence of the UN's impartiality, forbidding him to protect desperate civillians waiting to die. While the UN withdrew as the massacres escalated - 800,000 Rwandans were left to die.
The authors moral courage in writing this book is to be celebrated and it deserves a wide readership. Hopefully serving as a timely reminder that real opposition to war, famine and corruption involves more than simplistic Bush-hating and buying centre left newspapers while self conciously advertising your hatred of Republican foreign policy.
I wish the authors every success.

Could have been so much better
Saving lives while putting yours under risk sounds like the perfect material for a compelling memoir and the juicy title of this one sounds like it would deliver in spades. However I was ultimately disappointed by "Emergency Sex".

The book is written by three aid workers: Ken, a recent Harvard graduate; Heidi, a social worker from New York; and Andrew, an idealistic doctor from New Zealand. The three meet initially when they are all working in Cambodia and their stories intersect as they work together and separately on assignment in various `90s trouble spots: Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia. The book is written by each of them in turn and the pace is quick and lively. Parts are exciting (the description of being in Somalia when the Black Hawk helicopter was downed) or very moving (the description of the terrible atrocities in Rwanda and Liberia).

So it's an interesting read but somehow it failed to grab me. The book does convey what its like to be an aid worker: alternating fear, adrenalin, exhaustion, hopelessness, cynicism and only very occasionally the sense that you've made a small difference to the world. It certainly gives the flavour of how terrible things were in these places and how the UN could have done things better. However the three personalities never rang true for me. I didn't feel that I got to know these people. They all sounded curiously alike to me and I got the sense that Ken perhaps penned all three stories. Heidi comes across as Ken's fantasy girl with her limpid eyes and active sexual appetite. Andrew also comes across as Ken's fantasy of the heroic and noble doctor who windsurfs in his spare time. I'm not saying that these aren't real people, just that they never leapt off the page and became real to me.

Perhaps because of this, or perhaps because the nature of aid work is such that it's one long grind, the book dragged along for me. While I didn't mind it, I never felt the urge to pick it up and read more. I felt several times that I could have skipped 100 pages here or there and it wouldn't have made much difference. Really, you could flip open the book in a bookstore, read a few pages here and there, and get the flavour of the entire piece. It's not a bad book by any stretch, but it could have been much better with judicious editing.