The Mountain Road

The time is 1944. The setting is East Asia in flames. The characters are: Philip Baldwin, a New England major with his first command -- a tough and surly American demolition unit isolated in the great retreat of that turbulent year; Su-piao, a strong and beautiful Chinese woman educated in America; and Kwan, a frosty Chinese colonel who loves his country but must help ravish it. The story of their adventures in one violent week marks Theodore H. White's emergence as a major novelist.