Champion of Choice: The Life and Legacy of Women's Advocate Nafis Sadik

Essayist and creative writing teacher Miller (Desert Flower) offers an intimate, exhaustive biography of Nafis Sadik, a woman from an upper-class Indian family who became a physician and would eventually pioneer women's health and welfare rights around the world. By the time of her retirement, at age 70, as head of the UNFPA, Sadik was the top-ranking woman in the United Nations. While lauded as efficient and unendingly energetic, Miller also reveals Sadik's warts, including difficulties in adjusting to the U.S. and an estrangement from one of her daughters. Sadik was an enigma, a female physician who had to navigate the male-dominated ways and means of medicine. Yet just when her reluctant admirers would consider her "one of the boys' she would sneak out to go shopping." Interspersed with Sadik's biographical information are brief but powerful sketches about individual women's struggles to avoid traditional circumcision practices, obtain sex education about HIV/AIDS, or avoid sexual exploitation. The vignettes are interesting but they rarely have a direct tie back to Sadik, weakening what is already an information-laden book. (Mar.)