If there was a category of travel known as Hell Tourism, Bob Gersony would be one of its most avid practitioners. From war-torn regions of sub-Saharan Africa to hurricane-ravaged countries in Central America, for more than four decades, Gersony has devoted his life to bringing relief and hope to people residing in these benighted lands. Robert D. Kaplan’s THE GOOD AMERICAN is the fascinating account of Gersony’s work. Both informative and inspirational, it’s a testimonial to how much good one smart, empathetic, dedicated person can accomplish in the world.

It would be hard to find a more unlikely candidate for the role of humanitarian hero than Bob Gersony. A high school dropout who worked briefly as a commodity trader (the business in which his Holocaust refugee father made and lost a fortune) before serving in a noncombat role in Vietnam, Kaplan describes his subject, who bears a certain vague resemblance to Larry David, as “a character out of a Saul Bellow novel trapped in settings depicted by Joseph Conrad.” An introverted man of abstemious habits, including eating only one meal a day, he was stalked by anxiety and depression and yet somehow vanquished his psychological demons to place himself constantly in positions of physical hardship and extreme peril to gather, and then share, the stories of the oppressed and the victimized.

"Both informative and inspirational, it’s a testimonial to how much good one smart, empathetic, dedicated person can accomplish in the world.... THE GOOD AMERICAN is a frank reminder of the challenges and benefits of being part of the global community."

After a period of several years in Guatemala, where he established a network of Spanish language schools, in 1976 Gersony went to work as a freelance contractor for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), a bureaucracy established during the Kennedy administration that “was essentially the Third World development arm of the State Department,” with whom it existed in a sometimes tense equilibrium. From then until the early 2010s, in more than 50 assignments, Gersony’s fieldwork made him an indispensable, if publicly almost anonymous, figure.

From his first posting in Central America, Kaplan literally follows Gersony around the world (the two met in Sudan in 1985 and frequently crossed paths after that) from one trouble spot to the next as his career “charted the history of humanitarianism since the Vietnam War.” Whether he was developing an ingenious plan to combat piracy against Vietnamese refugees in the South China Sea in the mid-1980s, working episodically on development projects in Central and South America, or engaging with a politically explosive crisis like the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Kaplan explains how Gersony, "a moderate conservative with moral convictions, lacking the ideological blinders that would later destroy conservatism,” developed a unique yet highly effective technique for going about his work and rigorously applied it to better the lives of countless suffering people.

How Gersony almost obsessively applied that methodology becomes one of the themes of Kaplan’s book. In what he estimates were more than 8,000 exhaustive interviews, recorded with the pen Gersony always carried on a strap around his neck, and then transcribed during long, lonely evenings in cheap hotels, as 12-hour work days stretched into seven-day work weeks, he displayed a gift for connecting with ordinary people, painstakingly gathering their stories and then building effective responses to their plight out of that humble material.

“The whole point of his investigations was always to be in firsthand contact with the evidence, while at all costs avoiding groupthink,” Kaplan writes. Approaching each new situation without preconceptions --- notably any deeply ideological ones in the period when geopolitics shifted from the Cold War to the new complexities of life in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union --- allowed Gersony to bring a refreshing objectivity to his arduous, and often dangerous, tasks.

Another beauty of his method, as Kaplan’s account demonstrates, is that it was infinitely adaptable to the unimaginable variety of difficult situations he encountered across the globe. It also enabled Gersony, in masterly briefings of State Department and other government officials that often stretched for hours, to disrupt the conventional wisdom of bureaucrats and politicians who never would have had the courage to set foot in some of the terrifying places he dared to venture.

Kaplan’s book, which sometimes reads like an adventure story, is thick with detail, and though the glossary of some 50 acronyms he provides is helpful, he recognizes that even the most patient reader may at times succumb to a feeling of bewilderment. At one point in his description of Gersony’s work in Ethiopia and Somalia in 1989, he admits that “[i]f the reader is overwhelmed by all of this, he or she is supposed to be.” Yet out of this welter of foreign places and people, a compelling story of Gersony’s dedication and effectiveness emerges.

“We cannot hide from the world,” Kaplan writes, in summing up this admiring portrait of Bob Gersony’s consequential life and work and its constant tension between realism and idealism. As the United States makes the transition from an administration whose foreign policy was based on intentional disengagement with that world to one in which the country will play something that more resembles its traditional role, THE GOOD AMERICAN is a frank reminder of the challenges and benefits of being part of the global community. Perhaps it also will serve as a useful guide, and something of a prod, to future generations of Bob Gersonys who will have the responsibility of carrying on his vital work.