Publisher's Synopsis
The Good American is a story about courage, intense loneliness, and the State Department's golden age of the late Cold War. It is also a celebration of ground level reporting and getting a worm's eye few from the obscurity of crisis zones. Robert Gersony, a high-school drop-out later awarded a bronze star in Vietnam, spent over four decades on the ground in virtually every war and natural disaster zone in the world, interviewing hundreds of refugees and displaced persons in each place. Traveling the world to assess humanitarian crises, from Uganda to Honduras to Bosnia, Gersony's trademark on-the-ground research and thorough reports had an immense, underappreciated impact on US policy across the globe through the late Cold War and its aftermath. In every case, his recommendations made U. S. foreign policy smarter and more humane, often dramatically so.
