When a famine threatens the State
of Bihar in Eastern India in 1967, Roberta Meeker is among
the Peace Corps volunteers rushed in to assist in the relief
effort. Richard Verlock is in
charge of U.N. operations. He is deeply cynical about the
many do-gooders around him but is perversely attracted to Roberta,
the most idealistic of the whole crowd.
Roberta, sure that she can save the
world, faces India’s
stolidly entrenched caste system at a feeding center. The
plight and passivity of the women--their utter powerlessness
and subservience to men--incense her.
Harry Burns, a cynical Wall Street stockbroker, wakes up naked
except for some strips of fur, and lying on what seems to be
a forest floor. Soon he is discovered by a menacing group of
men who are similarly arrayed, and their hostile behavior leads
him inexorably, although amazingly, to the conclusion that he
has been captured by a fragile, endangered hunter/gatherer society
somewhere in the Pleistocene era. Still cursed or blessed with
his wry and savvy twenty-first-century consciousness, he understands
that his suspicious hosts will kill him unless he can be immediately
useful to them.