JUST WHISTLE.(The Talk of the Town)(Book Review)

The other day, Andrew Thomson, a doctor at the United Nations, received a memo thanking him for his service to the organization--service that extends back twelve years, and includes stints exhuming mass graves in Bosnia and Rwanda. The purpose of the memo was to inform Dr. Thomson that this service was now complete (contract: not renewed), and that his replacement would be starting on January 1st.

No reason was given, but Thomson wasn't surprised. He had been officially reprimanded in June for publishing a book without the U.N.'s permission. The book, "Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures: A True Story from Hell on Earth," published by Miramax, was written by Thomson and two U.N. colleagues, Kenneth Cain and Heidi Postlewait, and it is a diary-style account of several years spent on the peacekeeping front lines in the mid-nineties, during some of the gloomiest (and bloodiest) days in the institution's history--"a real-life modern-day m*a*s*h," according to the publisher. (The title refers to an erotic mid-trauma dalliance--love among the killings.) Cain has since left the U.N., but Postlewait remains an administrative assistant in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and she, too, received a reprimand. (Her contract is not up for eighteen more months.)

Senior U.N. officials were not terribly pleased with the book. Fred Eckhard, Secretary-General Kofi Annan's spokesman, called it "a sensational and selective account of peacekeeping." Shashi Tharoor, the Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information (and an overseer of the peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslavia, which is criticized in the book), has accused the authors of disloyalty.

Reached last week, Tharoor said, "It didn't seem right for people to work for the organization and trash it the way these people did." Doing so while collecting a paycheck, he said, was "slightly contemptible."

Now Thomson and Postlewait have sought the help of the Government Accountability Project, or gap, a leading whistle-blower law firm, which has represented, among others, David Graham, the F.D.A. doctor who cried foul on Vioxx. Earlier this month, gap sent a letter to Kofi Annan requesting a personal meeting and threatening legal action.

"Emergency Sex," with its tales of drug use and disillusionment and its emphasis on personal drama, is not a typical whistle-blowing tract. ("I want to rip my clothes off, rip Yusuf's clothes off, and just fuck him right there.") But the authors do make a number of serious allegations of corruption, negligence, and inadequate leadership, particularly with regard to the genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica. ("The ...