A young girl recalls a remarkable moment-how she waited patiently through a long, hot afternoon for night to fall so she and her family could make a journey to the top of a hill to see an amazing sight: a multitude of blinking, winking, twinkling fireflies lighting up a nearby mountain.

Readers will be able to hear the whistles of the bobwhites and smell the sweet-dry clover hay in Thomas's richly detailed prose. Illustrator Peter Sylvada's stunning illustrations beautifully capture the wondrous tone of the story and the expectant child's sense of awe as she looks at the fireflies dance among the stars up on top of Firefly Mountain.

Thomas shows how the scientists' youthful optimism is honed into gritty determination as they struggle with difficult research challenges, public condemnation of AIDS patients, cautious bureaucrats, conservative executives, hostile activists, and a perennial shortage of money. The lives and complex motivations of the characters illustrate the triumphs and frustrations of the quest for a vaccine. Interwoven with these gripping human stories are lucid explanations of how vaccines aim to block the potentially deadly tango of the AIDS virus and the human immune system.

Above all, Big Shot shows how the health of future generations rests on the shoulders of individuals who are as strong, and as weak, as the rest of us. Just as A Civil Action ultimately told us more about human nature than environmental law, Big Shot is about a great deal more than AIDS vaccines.