If you sat each respondent down and asked for a definition of heroism, you would get a thousand different answers. The French celebrity philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy defines a hero narrowly, as someone who tells the truth when it means risking his life. Others are so uncomfortable with the word that they prefer to use different, more subdued labels like role model or uncommon man.

For this special issue, a celebration of 36 extraordinary heroes, Time has taken the broad view (including geographically; because this edition is published throughout Africa and the Middle East as well as in Europe, we've chosen African and Middle Eastern heroes along with European ones). Most of the people profiled in these pages have stood without flinching in the face of very bad odds. Some put themselves in mortal danger. Others suffer. Some are activists, in the old-fashioned sense, stubbornly beating a drum to remind us of a reality we would prefer to ignore. Others are alchemists, turning grief that would have gutted most of us into defiant hope. Still others live more than comfortably while inspiring millions to hope for better things — that man can perform superhuman feats with a ball and a patch of grass, that magic still dwells in paper and ink.

Most of them are walking contradictions. A hero has to be, on the one hand, a dreamer — to believe against overwhelming odds that something can change. But a hero is also a realist. A hero does something useful; resignation is not an option.

And so in France, a businessman has begun collecting résumés from the blighted housing projects of the banlieues so he can shepherd young immigrants to recruiters, without the stigma their applications would carry coming in through the mail. In Iceland, a former engineer convinced people to save the whales not because they are pretty, but because the whale-watching industry could make more money than the whale-killing industry. And in the West Bank, a Palestinian surgeon endures the humiliation of a six-hour round-trip commute through armed checkpoints to save lives — both Arab and Jewish — in the operating room of an Israeli hospital. After decades of assuming the state would look after the collective good, Europeans have been forced to acknowledge that the government cannot manage the job alone. Individuals must fill the gaps.

In every case, if heroism requires courage and generosity, the last ingredient is circumstance. Jean-Christophe Rufin, a Goncourt-prizewinning novelist and president of Action contre la Faim, a private humanitarian organization, says his heroic model was his grandfather. Until he was sent to a Nazi prison camp for hiding people in his garage, he raised Rufin himself. "Physically, he was absolutely not a hero. He was short, thin and weak, though he resisted many things that would have killed me 10 times," Rufin says. "All the choices he made were kind of obvious things. It was the circumstances that made him a hero."

True heroes, says Emmanuelli, never know they are heroes. They just find themselves in a situation for which they have been preparing, unwittingly, all their lives. Then they do the right thing. "A hero understands that he is a tool," he says.

Says U2's Bono, who has ignored eye rolling far and wide to become Africa's most recognized advocate: "I know how absurd it is to have a rock star talk about debt relief or HIV/AIDS in Africa. But if not me, who?"

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