Postlewait, Heidi

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POSTLEWAIT, Heidi

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Hyperion Books, 77 West 66th St., 11th Floor, New York, NY 10023.

CAREER: United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, staff development program manager.

WRITINGS:

(With Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thompson) Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth, Miramax Books (New York, NY), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Heidi Postlewait is coauthor, along with Kenneth Cain and Andrew Thompson, of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth. The book serves as a memoir of each author's experiences as a humanitarian aid worker with the United Nations. It also stands as an "indictment of failed U.N. policy," stated Michael Hastings in Newsweek International, and "an unusual and candid look at the incompetence and corruption that has plagued the organization's peacekeeping efforts over the last twelve years," remarked Marshall Manson on Townhall.com. "The book is a searingly open and honest account of their lives and the evolution of their views and values as they travel from one foreign mission to the next," Manson stated.

Cain, a lawyer, Thomson, a doctor from New Zealand, and Postlewait, a social worker in New York, all met and became friends while serving the United Nations in Cambodia. At the time she joined the United Nations, Postlewait, "a secretary, just wanted to save some money and leave her broken marriage behind," noted Maggie Farley in Los Angeles Times. What she and her colleagues found in their travels, however, was not enthusiastic idealism made good, but instead, constant danger, systematic corruption, unchecked incompetence, and spectacular failures.

"In vivid and intimate first-person accounts that range from a few paragraphs to fifteen pages, the authors sequentially limn and reflect on experiences rarely exposed publicly," noted Sheri Fink in the Wilson Quarterly. Postlewait and her coauthors describe in detail the background of sex, drugs, and hard partying that accompanied many of the peacekeeping missions. Haitian election ballots were burned while still sealed in the ballot box. In Bulgaria, former prison inmates and psychiatric patients were sent to serve as U.N. peacekeepers. "Postlewait describes the unsound security practices that she believes led to the death of a colleague, contradicting the account in the official U.N. report," Fink reported. "The authors are scathing in their denunciation of the Clinton Administration for retreating in the face of the Somali militia," after failed missions in Mogadishu, noted Burke G. Sheppard on StrategyPage.com. Perhaps worst of all, in Rwanda, Liberia, Bosnia, Somalia, and other violent nations, U.N. peacekeepers failed to prevent sweeping genocide and the massacre of thousands.

Postlewait and her colleagues, considered whistleblowers by the United Nations, have been severely, perhaps illegally, sanctioned by that organization for their actions, and the United Nations tried unsuccessfully to block publication of the book. Postlewait and Thomson received official reprimands and threats of more serious action. She still works for the United Nations as "a training officer in the peacekeeping division, knowing that all of her colleagues have read the intimate details of her sex life," Farley reported. "She is unfazed by the whispers and the disapproval of peers who think she shouldn't have exposed the U.N.'s dirty laundry." The United Nations "has not worked with the authors to investigate or act on any specific whistleblowing allegations," reported an author on the Government Accountability Project Web site. "Instead, it reprimanded them for publishing the truth without advance prior approval—violating all international freedom of expression rights the U.N. advocates for the rest of the world."

The title of the coauthors' book derives from an incident in which Postlewait and a Somali interpreter spontaneously have sex in a derelict vendor's shack where they sought cover after nearly being killed in a sniper attack—a defiantly life-affirming act in the face of real danger and the grimmest despair. "Postlewait's sexual encounters provide a raw insight into the alienation, connection, and betrayal that come with trying to live a normal life against the backdrop of mortar attacks, sniper fire, and chaos," observed Farley.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures "infuriating, heart-wrenching, and well written," while a Kirkus Reviews critic named it "an earnest report from the trenches" of U.N. activity.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2004, review of EmergencySex and Other Desperate Measures, p. 307.

Los Angeles Times, October 18, 2004, Maggie Farley, "The Jaded, Seamy Side of Peace," review of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, p. E1.

Newsweek International, June 21, 2004, Michael Hastings, review of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, p. 69.

Publishers Weekly, March 8, 2004, review of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, p. 57.

Washington Times, May 27, 2004, Stewart Stogel, "U.N. Missions Painted as Booze-soaked Orgies," review of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures.

Wilson Quarterly, summer, 2004, Sheri Fink, review of Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures, p. 119.