Originally published in 2006, this powerful, disturbing, award-winning novel chronicles the free-wheeling mishaps of one Nathan James Morris, a talented, ambitious middle-class black kid from Prince Georges County, Maryland. At 19, he has been expelled from Freedom College for alleged misconduct. He has few friends, aside from the parasitic Guy Sellers; and save for his scholarship's chump change, even fewer dollars. Hurt, angry, and in desperate need of cash, he joins the Marines. "The road to manhood is paved with tanks and convoys!" he loudly boasts. 

But he soon discovers that his own “road” has been paved with far more unpleasant things: whimsical officers, endless bomb attacks, disease, an unbelievable desolation. After the military, his “road” gets rockier....an unhappy reuniting with family, friends and fiancee....a kidnaping in Turkey ....violent confrontations with neo-Nazis and racist North Africans....his studies and miseries at C.S.U., America’s most prestigious black university, and his final days in a DC slum, as witness to (and participant in) the wild destruction of his older brother’s marriage, with a little help from the one “friend” who never seems to leave him be: Guy Sellers.