Summer, 1944. In the `stifling heat of equatorial Newark`, a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. Vigorous, decent, twenty-three year old playground director Bucky Cantor is devoted to his charges & 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 inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering & the pain. Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth`s late short novels, Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, & now, Nemesis: what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?