Robert Kaplan, The Good American ****

The Good American presents itself as a biography of Bob Gersony, a State Department consultant who consistently entered disaster zones to interview refugees and advise governments and NGOs about the truth on the ground. The book does indeed follow Gersony from Central America to Africa and Asia, but it's really a paean to the vanished breed of "realist" government officials who take action based on detailed local knowledge rather than political principle. Gersony encounters such people on every project he works on.

I learned a lot about the humanitarian crises of the past few decades. Kaplan is good at sketching the places and summarizing the political landscape. I appreciated reading the biography of a front-line guy dedicated to hearing from the people affected by government policies.

In Kaplan's telling, Gersony interviews hundreds of ordinary people, asking questions and synthesizing their answers without a hint of ideological bias, then gives extremely detailed briefings to the agencies that hire him. His recommendations emerge from the data. When Gersony successfully influences policy, it's because the officials are practical and data driven; when his suggestions are rejected or ignored, it's because the officials are letting ideological bias drive their decision making.

But of course Gersony has an ideological bias -- everyone does. The bias usually coincides with the bias of the people who hire him for an assignment, and it certainly coincides with Kaplan's. Later in his career, Gersony tackles some explicitly political situations, such as interviewing folks in the Green Zone in Iraq, and his recommendations do no naturally flow from the data he collects. Kaplan relegates most of the controversies about Gersony's reports to the footnotes.

I have on my shelf a biography of Richard Holbrooke, who crosses paths with Gersony in the Balkan conflict and who is exactly the sort of principled character that Kaplan compares unfavorably to practical realists like Gersony. It'll be interesting to hear the other side.