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A review by lesserjoke
Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone by Kenneth Cain
3.0
I have profoundly mixed feelings on this book, which documents its three authors' experiences as United Nations peacekeepers in the 1990s. They initially meet while stationed together in Cambodia, but ultimately travel on to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda, sometimes reconnecting but largely stuck apart. The situations they encounter in these far-flung areas are eye-opening and awful, including graphically-detailed accounts of rape, torture, slaughter, cannibalism, and similar war crimes. It's a horribly educational read, and I appreciate the growing critical perspective that the armchair leaders back home in Washington and New York are out-of-touch with the daily horrors of conditions on the ground.
I just wish I could like the writers better. They do grow somewhat more appealing over time as the various events around them deteriorate, but two of them are very frustrating in the early pages. Heidi Postlewait repeatedly offers fatphobic asides, casually drops the r-word, and generally seems focused on her sex life and the low cost of living abroad over any humanitarian mission at hand. Kenneth Cain objectifies her and every other woman he comes across, and is petulantly melodramatic about not knowing exactly what he wants to do now that he's graduated Harvard Law School. Only Dr. Andrew Thomson appears mature and compelling right from the start as he seeks to uncover forensic evidence of cruelty and heal its many victims, yet his passages are sadly outnumbered by the antics of the two junior members of the team.
It's hard to know what to do with a title like that overall. The later chapters are excellent if a bit stomach-churning -- again, major content warning for gore, violence, and dead bodies -- but I likely would have put the thing down well before that point had it not been picked out for me by a generous Patreon donor. I previously knew little of the geopolitics of the era or these particular crises, so I'm grateful for the firsthand view provided herein. But memoir as a genre relies on an engaging authorial voice as much as interesting circumstances, and I'm not convinced this one totally gets there for me.
[I checked out this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation today at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke !]
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I just wish I could like the writers better. They do grow somewhat more appealing over time as the various events around them deteriorate, but two of them are very frustrating in the early pages. Heidi Postlewait repeatedly offers fatphobic asides, casually drops the r-word, and generally seems focused on her sex life and the low cost of living abroad over any humanitarian mission at hand. Kenneth Cain objectifies her and every other woman he comes across, and is petulantly melodramatic about not knowing exactly what he wants to do now that he's graduated Harvard Law School. Only Dr. Andrew Thomson appears mature and compelling right from the start as he seeks to uncover forensic evidence of cruelty and heal its many victims, yet his passages are sadly outnumbered by the antics of the two junior members of the team.
It's hard to know what to do with a title like that overall. The later chapters are excellent if a bit stomach-churning -- again, major content warning for gore, violence, and dead bodies -- but I likely would have put the thing down well before that point had it not been picked out for me by a generous Patreon donor. I previously knew little of the geopolitics of the era or these particular crises, so I'm grateful for the firsthand view provided herein. But memoir as a genre relies on an engaging authorial voice as much as interesting circumstances, and I'm not convinced this one totally gets there for me.
[I checked out this title at a Patreon donor’s request. Want to nominate your own books for me to read and review (or otherwise support my writing)? Sign up for a small monthly donation today at https://patreon.com/lesserjoke !]
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter