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.