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Flight of the Diamond Smugglers: A Tale of Pigeons, Obsession, and Greed Along Coastal South Africa
Bottom of the pile
8
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
1/100Critics
15/100Scholars
Author:
Matthew Gavin Frank
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
February 23, 2021
Frank investigates a long overlooked story. Weaving interviews with local diamond miners who raise pigeons in secret with harrowing anecdotes from former heads of security, environmental managers, and vigilante pigeon hunters, Frank reveals how these feathered bandits became outlaws in every mining town.
What The Reviewers Say
If you get nothing else from this book, you will realize what a truly astonishing creature you are shooing out of your way on the sidewalk or cursing for crapping all over your car.
... a work of strange beauty born of personal tragedy. Frank and his wife Louisa’s sixth miscarriage set him on the path to this book—an often unsettling, thoroughly researched, poetically expressed mélange of memoir, historical analysis and philosophical meditation.
... crisp and poetic prose.
Unexpected connections abound in Frank's lyrical work, wherein — through visits to portions of this land, declared by De Beers in 2007 to be 'overmined' — he excavates the troubling history of this little-known landscape and the illicit industry of trafficking the precious stones.
