July 16 (Bloomberg) -- When Jan Egeland arrived in Zimbabwe as the United Nations's emergency-relief coordinator in December 2005, he offered tents to shelter thousands of slum dwellers whose homes President Robert Mugabe had ordered destroyed.

``Tents are for Arabs!'' Mugabe said, rebuffing the offer.

``It was one of those situations when you do not know whether to cry, laugh, or shout,'' Egeland writes in ``A Billion Lives,'' a book chronicling his more than three years as the head of UN efforts to help victims of civil wars, natural disasters and brutish governments.

A close aide to former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Egeland traveled to the margins of the planet between 2003 and 2006 to bring international aid to the one billion people who lack ``drinking water, daily food, or even a dollar a day to survive on.'' Yet he emerged from his journeys an optimist. Life for the majority of the planet's people is improving, he writes, giving rich countries a rare opportunity to help the poor.

``Those of us in the exploding global middle and upper classes have fewer absolute poor to lift out of abject misery and fewer wars and genocides to end,'' he writes. ``And we have at the same time infinitely greater resources at hand.''

Whether hauling journalists around war-stricken Darfur or raising funds for tsunami victims, Egeland saw his mission as shaping the global news agenda. He calls his UN job a pulpit.

He never tired of talking to the reporters -- including this one -- who tagged along with him, whether floating up the Nile with a boatload of Sudanese refugees, visiting war victims in southern Darfur, or meeting with Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony along the Sudan-Congo border. Along the way, he'd field phone calls from the British Broadcasting Corp. and Cable News Network.

`Stingy' West

Sometimes Egeland stirred controversy, angering Western nations by calling them ``stingy'' in their aid donations. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert canceled a meeting with Egeland after he accused Israel of using disproportionate force in one attack in south Beirut, where Hezbollah was based. As for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, he says, it has left the country more afflicted than the Democratic Republic of Congo or Darfur.

``In no other place on earth have so many been killed by blunt violence during the last five years,'' he writes.

The day he arrived in New York to take up his post in August 2003, a truck bomb exploded next to UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing 22 people, including the UN's special representative to Iraq, Egeland's friend Sergio Vieira de Mello.

``The age of innocence had gone,'' he writes, reflecting on the reality that even the UN is now a target.

Praising Himself

``A Billion Lives'' would have been more effective if Egeland had spent less time recounting what he said in meetings and phone conversations conducted in UNese, that stilted mish- mash of technical and diplomatic English. He quotes himself unashamedly and all too often praises his own record.

Egeland unquestionably has a lifetime of experience in the aid world. Born in Norway in 1957, he traveled to Colombia after high school to work with the poor, and later returned as a Norwegian state secretary and a special envoy of Annan to seek the ever-illusive peace with the rebels. He was also a member of the team that negotiated the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993.

Now the director general of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Egeland acknowledges that publicity doesn't necessarily bring results.

``I did believe -- naively it now appears -- back in 2003 and early 2004 that the growing and forgotten Darfur crisis would get better if we managed to bring it to the attention of world leaders,'' he writes.

Though Darfur became a cause celebre, the crisis only deepened.

``A Billion Lives: An Eyewitness Report From the Frontlines of Humanity'' is published by Simon & Schuster (253 pages, $27, 18.99 pounds).

(Karl Maier writes for Bloomberg News. Opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Karl Maier in Rome at kmaier2@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 15, 2008 19:59 EDT