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After his older brother’s tragic death, Ken Verrier drops out of his classes at Cornell University in the summer of 1961 to opt for life as a transport pilot in West Africa. The ever-present dung beetles become a metaphor for the various groups he flies from the capital, Monrovia, and into the bush. All of these groups seem to be seeking to “roll” something out of Liberia. The Americo-Liberians live as “big men” at the top of the national social ladder. The missionaries and Peace Corps volunteers seek to do good. Meanwhile, the diplomats, politicians, international corporations, hustlers, ex-Nazis, and Israeli Nazi-hunters are all scrambling to manifest their agendas and reap profit amidst a mosaic of tribal cultures.
As the young pilot’s dramatic new life plays out in this legendary decade of financial boom reminiscent of America’s expansion into the “Wild West,” it is notable that the civil rights movement and the anti-war protests over America's involvement in Vietnam are unfolding back home. Nearby, apartheid still has an iron grip on South Africa, making the social strata of independent Liberia under autocratic President William Tubman increasingly fascinating.
The reader will easily forget that this biographical novel is not a memoir. Meier uses the first-person point of view and the highly-detailed, but occasionally episodic, turns of a life recalled to tell this fast-paced historical tale. With a gift for portraying dialect, character quirks, and the intricacies of combining salient details of his youthful adventures with fictional flights of fancy, Meier flies readers on this soaring, literary saga that will leave them clamoring for a sequel.
RECOMMENDED by the US Review