Emergency Sex: A True Story from Hell on Earth by Kenneth Cain, Andrew Thomson, Heidi Postlewait

From the Publisher

Published amidst great controversy in hardcover, Emergency Sex has literally shaken the foundations of the United Nations and made headlines around the world. Three idealists searching for meaning in the world’s toughest war zones; three people thrown together who bond for dear life. In a memoir so powerful and staggeringly well-written that it’s impossible to put down, Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson describe the UN Peacekeeping missions that challenged everything they believed in and changed them irrevocably.

As their stories interweave, taking them to wartorn hotspots, the three friends reveal a world that is a cacophony of dodged bullets, witnessed atrocities, primal desires, and exotic pleasures. Emergency Sex is lyrical, graphic, and devastatingly honest.

Kenneth L. Cain, Heidi Postlewait and Andrew Thomson served in UN Peacekeeping Operations in the 1990s. The authors live in New York.

Publishers Weekly

Ah, to be young, Western and ambitious in a war zone. It's the early 1990s, and Cain and Postlewait are two American U.N. employees sent to Cambodia to help the country rebuild itself after two decades of war and genocide. Thomson is a New Zealand-trained doctor who has already been there for a short while, patching up limbs shattered by land mines and looking for a corner of the world to save. The three meet during the U.N.'s efforts to install democracy in one of the unlikeliest places. Idealism, financial need, thirst for adventure and the desire to be a part of history bring them there, and the high they get from doing their work keeps them flitting around the globe, looking for hot spots to help cool down. The trio's early success in Southeast Asia is only added encouragement, as they follow their own intertwining paths through the wars and killings of the 1990s. From Cambodia, Somalia and Haiti, to Bosnia, Rwanda and Liberia, Cain, Postlewait and Thomson find death, sex, bureaucratic betrayal, sex, liberation from their pasts and seamy, regret-tainted sex amid the body parts and rotting flesh. Infuriating, heart-wrenching and well written, their tale is compelling both as a bottom-up look at U.N. peacekeeping efforts during the 1990s and a testimonial from the people who put their lives and sanity on the line for the sake of a simple idea peace. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (June 9) Forecast: This memoir could appeal to under-35 Peace Corps volunteers and other young idealists. The authors will promote the book in New York and Washington, D.C. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An earnest report from the trenches, filed by three UN humanitarian aid workers with plenty of bad news to relate. The tale opens in New York, with young Heidi, married to a high-powered model agent with a taste for the good life, seeking "the perfect little black fuck-me dress to wear" to an industry party. She is dissatisfied with her lot: "I'm thirty years old and my life is over." Flash forward to Harvard Law grad Ken, who has little interest in the suburban life suited to "ninety percent of my classmates because it provides shelter for all that mirthless self-confidence." Ken decides instead to save the world, following the path of social-service doctor Andrew, the son of missionaries who has seen his fair share of misery. In 1993, the three meet in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, assigned to monitor the first free elections since Pol Pot left town; there, Heidi reckons that she can save enough money to set herself up decently in New York, Andrew grumbles that the old-school humanitarian aid scene is being overwhelmed by arrivistes, and Ken worries that the last remnants of the Khmer Rouge are now targeting UN workers. Their work done, the three rocket off to trouble spots around the globe, places like Mogadishu, Port-au-Prince, and Srebenica, doing good and eluding danger. The three-voiced memoir is a nice idea, but none of our narrators is a particularly skilled writer, all tend toward sentimentalism (Heidi: "The pure beauty of death is as impossible to describe as the birth of a child, the betrayal of a lover, the moment of orgasm"), and no one delivers any real surprises: from them we learn that war is hell, life as an aid worker is alternately dangerous and boring, and the world isunjust. A modest contribution to the literature of humanitarian aid, joining such recent superior efforts as Philip Rieff's A Bed for the Night (2002) and Jason Carter's Power Lines (2002).

What People Are Saying

Tim O'Brien
Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures is a true story about three friends trying to bring a bit of decency to some of the most savage and indecent spots on our planet. On that level alone the book succeeds. It is also a reminder that flesh-and-blood human beings are out there doing God's work in this bloody, bloody world. I was enthralled.
—author of The Things They Carried

Philip Gourevitch
This is in every sense a hell of a good book, a powerful testament of the limits of peacekeeping in today's war zone—acutely observed, and told with astonishing immediacy. Blunt and unflinching, these three innocents abroad get it all down: the idealism, the adventurism, the grandiosity, the heroism, the futility, the disillusion, the despair, the lustiness, the folly, the survivor's humor, the political cravenness, the sustaining satisfactions, the burn out and the incessant death. They have given us a coming-of-age story that is also a story of the age we live in, at its rare best and its persistent worst.
—author of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

Doug Stanton
It's as if Crosby, Hope, and Myrna Loy had hit the road in an apocalyptic tour of the globe's epic messes. But this trio is a band of idealists, not tourists. This is what it feels like to hang your hide on the Edge for reasons bigger than any of us. Yet the miracle of the book is its grit, its pounding pace. The voices linger in the air after the page is turned.
—author of In Harm's Way

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