This novel of a young man's encounter with manhood and the culture of the Cold War 1950s is played out against the backdrop of the Korean Conflict experienced by a group of sailors sitting it out stateside in a Navy supply dump in Pensacola, Florida. Michael Devlin's journey from the Brooklyn of his childhood into the South exposes him to the American "other" which lies outside the urban, ethnic neighborhoods of his boyhood. Michael wants to know what America is, or what it has become beyond the images offered up by the popular media or the movies: Sometimes I think about America (after looking at Life or The Saturday Evening Post) and it's like a foreign country. I never went to any of these American things: sock hops, drive-in movies, homecoming games, pajama parties . . . I used to look at Archie comics like they were science fiction...