The Dove Is Never Free

Many books have been written in recent years about the humanitarian aid system and its failings, but there are not many good personal memoirs of front-line international emergency work. One of the most striking, for its title at least, is Emergency Sex (and Other Desperate Measures): A True Story from Hell on Earth, written by three United Nations workers whose paths crossed over a dozen years in Cambodia, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. In the end, however, Emergency Sex and others like it tend to be rather self-absorbed: a lot of running for cover, desperate refugee camps, occasional bouts of heavy drinking and struggles against unreasonable orders from bureaucrats in far-off headquarters — like M.A.S.H. for the new millennium.

Richard Heinzl’s Cambodia Calling: A Memoir from the Frontlines of Humanitarian Aid is a bit like this, although it lacks...