Bucky Cantor is a twenty-three-year-old playground director during the summer of 1944, disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war. As polio begins to ravage Bucky's playground, Roth leads us through every emotion such a pestilence can breed and startlingly depicts Cantor's passage into personal disaster, the condition of childhood, and the effect that the polio epidemic has on a community and its children. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral.