A boy attends summer camp where campers are tasked with managing their own flocks of sheep; a set of brothers kidnap their father's prized pet buffalo; a young man travels the country with his mother, a peripatetic professor who has pioneered a radical service-learning curriculum; an unemployed man attempts to teach himself to beat a polygraph test. In The Machine We Trust, Tim Conrad's narrators and characters come of age in a surreal American landscape-sometimes late, sometimes unsuccessfully. With exacting prose that searches and clutches, Conrad exposes the cracks where hearts are broken, and redemption is just one chance away.