Flight of the Diamond Smugglers

Starred review from December 1, 2020

Equal parts memoir and investigative reporting, the latest from Frank (creative writing, Northern Michigan Univ.; Preparing the Ghost) is a page-turning tale of suspense. During a trip to his wife's native South Africa to spread their child's ashes at Big Hole, an underground mine turned tourist attraction, Frank decided to learn more about the history of the mine. This curiosity leads him to 13-year-old mineworker Msizi and his pigeon Bartholomew. Through Msizi, the author learns how mineworkers sneak trained carrier pigeons onto mine property, affix diamonds to their feet or wings, and send them into the air to fly to worker's homes. Frank quickly learns that not all pigeons survive--some are weighed down by diamonds while others are confiscated by mine security. With novelistic writing, Frank masterfully weaves a fast-paced history of South Africa's Diamond Coast, and the impact of De Beers controlling both the land and the government. His thorough reporting on mineworkers, their pigeons, and towns that have struggled in the wake of mine closures makes for compelling reading. The author excels in allowing people to speak for themselves, adding personal touches to a history of greed and trauma. VERDICT Frank writes a fascinating story of grief and history that will draw readers in from the first page. Must-read narrative nonfiction.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2020
Frank chronicles his trip to South Africa to conduct a "funeral ceremony of sorts" at a vast diamond mine. As he did in Preparing the Ghost (2014), the author creates an intriguing and unusual blend of genres. Here he mixes natural history with anthropology and a twist of true crime in a tale of small-scale theft. Along the Diamond Coast, he met Msizi, a young man who works belowground to harvest diamonds--and who smuggles in a pigeon to whose legs he ties tiny bits of the precious stone in an act of "quiet--but punishable--piracy." Msizi's thefts are tiny given a diamond harvest that, Frank notes, can be more than 176 million carats per year. A small army of men monitor the workers, who have devised many clever ways to sneak out diamond fragments, including using catapults to "shoot hollowed-out steel bolts, packed with diamonds" into the surrounding desert. Getting caught can mean torture and death. The army is led by Mr. Lester, a would-be chemist who instead joined the South African army and then went into security work; by Frank's account, he's a thoughtful but dangerous man. The pages are stuffed with notes on how pigeons live their lives, drinking with their heads down and carrying complex maps in their minds that enable them to locate their homes. The author's prose is mannered, with a hint of the MFA workshop to it, as when he writes, "Perhaps it's not God who has the answers to our seemingly unanswerable questions about ourselves--as Newton may have believed--but the loaded-up pigeons, some of whom, in a crisis of weight, will unexpectedly land and offer us a clue into the circulatory map of all the things we wish to hide from the rest of our species." A little of this overwriting goes a long way, and there's a lot of it. The overall story, however, is interesting. Not without merits, but it might have worked better as a long-form magazine piece.

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