- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Rider (Jun 5 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1846041015
- ISBN-13: 978-1846041013
- Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 4 x 24 cm
- Shipping Weight: 721 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #645,428 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most helpful customer reviews
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Other Peoples' Tomorrows,
By
This review is from: An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
Just finished Dr. James Orbinski's new book, An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action for the 21st Century. For those of you who don't know him, Orbinski is one of Canada's global health heroes. He accepted the Nobel Prize for Doctors Without Borders while he was its international president and has since worked on developing MSF's Access to Essential Medicine's Campaign and establishing Dignitas International, an organization that provides community-based HIV/AIDS treatment in Malawi.I've heard Orbinski speak a couple of times, including at the Hope in the Balance forum last November. His talks provoke the idea of thoughts and a world view constantly evolving. This makes him especially human, despite his almost super-human committment to justice and health. One of his strongest messages is the world's need to create what he calls "humanitarian space," unobstructed by politics and military. Orbinski's experiences in Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and elsewhere have made clear the problems of military co-option of humanitarian action. The classic example is the dropping of both bombs and food packets within Afghanistan; in several cases children have confused the two and were harmed rather than fed. Orbinski's book is part memoir, part call to action. He takes the reader through some of the most devastating humanitarian disasters of the past 20-odd years, from the Rwandan Genocide to New York on September 11, 2001, when Orbinski worked in triage at Ground Zero. It struck me that on several occasions Orbinski has had a relationship with the countries he visits beyond their experience of humanitarian emergency, allowing him to describe the harsh differences between the time of acute crisis and normal daily life. For example, he worked in Rwanda doing HIV/AIDS research several years before the start of the 1994 genocide. This element helps him to challenge the perspective of African nations (and other developing countries) as places of perpetual crisis, while at the same time demanding action when that crisis does take place. Books about global health and its personalities are compelling reads. For some reason they are more successful at keeping me riveted than Tipping Point or The DaVinci Code ever were. Perhaps it is because despite the complexities of humanitarian action that Orbinski describes, the moral action of healing the sick seems so much less ambiguous than the general project of development. However, as he describes his own quest to ask the right questions he deems necessary to improve "other peoples' tomorrows," Orbinski recognizes the political side of humanitarian action, and the need to speak up about what he has witnessed.
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
A ray of Hope,
By Smaantha "Poots" (nowhere) - See all my reviews
This review is from: An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
It really is difficult to find words to describe the hope that this book gives. Although it describes deeply disturbing and difficult to comprehend suffering, it is written by a man who continually describes himself as 'a man' but describes situations in where his behaviour and devotion come straight from heaven. "A human perspective on suffering" just doesn't do this book justice. this book provides the decidely un-human (meaning more than human) perspective and unbelievable willingness to accept hope in the face of evidence that there should be none. It should be mandatory reading.
4.0 out of 5 stars
When Medicine Has No Cure...,
By Anastasia Prozorova "Prokrida" (Montreal, Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)
James Orbinski stays true to his profession even when writing the book. As a true doctor, he is honest and compassionate as he gives his account of the atrocities he witnessed/survived at the end of the 20th - beginning of the 21st century. Unfortunately, this is not the first nor the last book about ongoing genocides and mind-blowing ignorance. There is currently no cure for genocides. They still happen and they will continue to happen again and again. It can happen anywhere as modern-day genocidaires manage to find new "causes" for hatred and extermination...Like any human being, the author of the book tries to restore the sanity in the mid of this chaos and impose an order on this depressing, pitiless, and ruthless natural world with no rules. In the book, James Orbinski tries to avoid the inescapable truth, that speaking out against genocide, acting against it, imposing the rules on it cannot prevent this inexplicable, but deliberate "human choice" (pp.163-164) from being made again and again. However, he believes in "human rights" and "humanitarian action" as if not solution, but, at least, the treatment for the tragic choice each of us makes. The belief that all people should share the same human values in this increasingly interconnected world is a wishful thinking. It is a sweet self-deception of the medicine, as well as law and politics, to think that there is some kind of collective cure for our epidemic desire to exterminate those who don't share our values. It is always hard to face our inability to control ourselves and the world around us. In this light, humanitarian action is truly "an imperfect offering"... But philosophical wanderings apart, the book will force you to reconsider the way you viewed such politicians as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Boris Yeltsin as well as other Russian leaders mentioned in the book (among the ones I heard a lot about)... It is astonishing how their public image differs from their actual actions/inactions... I lived in Russia from 1984 to 2002, but the issue of Russian politicians blocking humanitarian aid from Chechnya never attracted any wide public attention in Russia, now that I think about it... In any case, "An Imperfect Offering" is an important work that will engage the reader in one way or the other and will not leave anyone indifferent...
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