Smoke

The year 1937 was a perilous one, but not yet as explosive as the terrible forces of displacement and war that would soon overtake Europe and the whole world. Through the eyes of a young American, Philip Morrow, we sojourn through an Old World that is slowly overheating with new friction. In London, Philip is doing business, representing an American tobacco company. He's a curious, ambitious young man who has forsaken the new world -- his mercantile beginnings in a small mountain town, his university education -- to embark on a roundabout odyssey in the Old World. The path Philip chooses, or that has chosen him, compels the young American along a trail of discovery. It becomes a sojourn in which he begins to understand how and why his father had a fateful appointment with eternity on a Belgian battleground in 1918. In a Europe still weary from the last war, Philip gets his first real history lesson -- not the kind of lesson you receive in school, but the kind you get when the torrents of history, and a current of love, get a hold of you.