What happens when the dreams of a father are not the dreams of his children? "News of the world outside seemed unreal in Ornevka, as fantastic as Reuven Werth's story of Baron Rothschild and the Mohilev rabbi. In the world outside, if you believed the tales, tsars and Kaisers and kings rattled swords, built battleships, and committed whole nations to war or peace as easily as a cattle merchant agreed to sell a heifer. Revolutionaries were ready to topple regimes, turn workers into bosses, and elevate the lowliest to the ranks of the mighty, all the while making love to women who weren't their wives. In the lascivious stories of the drummers, actresses made love with kings, actors made love with other actors, and women revolutionaries would make love with anyone. The politics of the world outside-treaties, wars, revolutions-was a mad whirl, seemingly out of control. New inventions like electric lights, the telegraph, and steamships were coming so fast the world would be unrecognizable in a few years."

Ronald Florence is a novelist and historian, the author of ten previous books, including The Gypsy Man, The Perfect Machine, and Lawrence and Aaronsohn. He has also written about a WWI assassin, women socialists, transatlantic flights on the Graf Zeppelin, racing and cruising sailboats, the last season before WWII in Newport, the Damascus blood libel, and an effort to rescue as many as one million Jews from the Holocaust. Several books have been published in foreign editions, and The Perfect Machine is the basis of a PBS documentary.