1998. Mack Hooper, a middle-aged history professor reads in the NY Times that 40 years ago, according to revelations made at secret congressional hearings, the King of the newly vanished small country of Kurash was paid a monthly stipend by the resident.

That Station Chief was Mack's father, now retired in Boston. And Mack has come to Boston in search of the truth about his father's past, a past steeped in the rubble of the Cold War.

1958. Mark Hooper, an American Intelligence Officer, with his wife and their small son, is sent to live in Kurash, a country lodged between Syria and Iraq. His assignment: to get close to the King of Kurash, an enigmatic, British-educated desert aristocrat who has remained indifferent to American foreign policy.

Moving backwards and forwards in time, Henry Bromell weaves together the story of the past and the present: and writes of his father, now the retired State Department veteran, who will not speak of his long-ago work as an Intelligence officer.

And his father, then the glamorous, Quaker-raised, Yale educated, sometime poet, who disappeared secretly at odd hours of the night, sometimes for days.

And he tells the story of Kurash itself: a country pulled apart by Cold War politics, and nationalist pride, and of the young man who was its king and the friendship that grew between King and Station Chief.

Little America is the story of what happens to history -- and what happens inside of it. It is the story of a time when life was flattened to fit the stereotypes of Us and Them, of the conflict betweenprivate morality and public policy, between the ends and the means. And most hauntingly, of a life gone by, and of a strict vow of secrecy enforced and still honored by those who are old now and frail, a time barely remembered when Americans set out, armed with "good intentions" and boyish desires for adventure, to save the world.