Sometimes, after some insanity, after war, murder, mayhem, some ordinary woman or some ordinary man set out to put the pieces of civilization back together again. They ask neither for fame nor for glory nor for gratitude. To do what they feel is right, because they are human beings is, it seems, quite enough for them. Ruth Karstens and Ted Whitman were such people. This is their story.

        In the spring of 1948, Ruth Karstens, a young widow and refugee, struggles to survive in a western German city devastated by war. Hunger and poverty, tenacity and resourcefulness, are ever-present guests in the crammed attic room where she lives with her two small children, Penelope and Eva, and her sister, Hannah. Having escaped from a Russian prison camp, Hannah has had to leave her five-year-old daughter, Pauli, behind in Berlin with her mother-in-law, Martha, who stalls bringing the child west. When the Russians threaten to blockade Berlin, Ruth decides to get the child. 

        The journey requires a visa from the Allied Forces occupying Germany at the time where Ruth meets Major Ted Whitman, an American pilot, temporarily assigned to the visa office because of an injury. Ted falls in love with Ruth the moment she stands before him in her mended dress and her borrowed jewelry, her proud demeanor and her defiant air that seek to mask her abominable poverty. Her fate so moves him that he risks a court martial to get her passage to Berlin even though all unessential travel has been suspended. Shortly after she arrives in Berlin, the Russians do start the blockade and stop all modes of transportation, stranding Ruth and the child. The Russians, however, are no match for the resourceful and defiant Ruth, who is determined to bring Pauli home to Hannah.

         Some forty years later, prompted by her own painful childhood memories of a world utterly broken by war, Penelope Karstens writes a novel of her mother’s perilous but triumphant journey through enemy territory, of the courageous folks who helped her, and of the American who loved her. The manuscript, titled  The Good American, unwittingly becomes a document of redemption for Ted Whitman's estranged son, Alex. Now himself a pilot, he reluctantly searches for Penelope to fulfill one of his father’s last wishes.  

This novel is dedicated to the Good American, wherever he is now. One can't write such a book, however, without also dedicating it to all the women who, after some insanity--whenever and wherever--manage, somehow and unflinchingly, to pick up the pieces and to go on.