Wes and Dirk, both born in August 1945, were like many in their generation affected by the radiocaesium from the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan that month. The bombs' radioactive contamination turned them and hundreds of thousands of others into the idealist activists of the 1960s and 1970s who fought for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.

Dirk, who tells the story of their lives, takes the reader on a decades-long, coast-to-coast trip, through protests, riots, and strikes. He and Wes become truckdrivers and help to organize a rebellion in the Teamsters, dealing with trucking company bosses, corrupt union officials, the FBI, and the Mafia. We learn of their love affairs, their marriages, and their infidelities. The country changes, the old movements die, age, yet the fight still goes on. What, Dirk asks, has been the meaning of it all?