Emergency Sex

I found this book at random in a little bookstore-cafe with an idiosyncratic "recommendations" shelf. (I like recommendations so much.) The title, of course, is eye-catching. The rest of the book does not disappoint! It is the separate but intertwined stories of three UN peace-keepers, each with different skills and proclivities, but held together by a curiously strong friendship (nothing more--not a love-triangle story!). They are: a doctor, a lawyer, and a social worker. At the beginning you think that three such eager and conscientious people will join forces and save ... well, if not the world, at least someone, or something. They do have their victories, but the victories are small in the face of a much huger futility. Is it the badness of human nature? of government any government? or just of UN bureaucracy? It's not clear. They're very much in the thick of things, even as they write.

They don't offer very much in the way of sweeping generalizations. Instead they offer a view from the ground, where torture and massacre and horrible prisons and disease and being shot at get almost the same amount emphasis as parties and friendships and sex and the difficulty of trying to fit in and being satisfied with one's existence. The really interesting thing is that the stage of world events and the sphere of the individual do not seem disjoint in this book. They are mutually responsive. I loved this book and stayed up all night reading it. The critique (of the UN, of the US, of pretty much everything) is scathing, but after seeing what they saw, you have to grant them the right to make that critique.