Matthew Gavin Frank’s new nonfiction book,
Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, is about, among other things, the ways in which carrier pigeons were used by diamond smuggling rings in coastal South Africa.
At Lit Hub the author tagged his "favorite books which feature, in some form or another, flying things," including:
Parrot
Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped
Ward burnishes the proverbial caged bird and resets it amid the over-lit grotesquerie of a claustrophobic sitting room which is itself embedded into such sweeping personal, familial, and social tragedy begotten of systemic racism and an attendant cycle of poverty. Ward’s book engages the wrenching, cruel, and premature losses of five young men in her life over the span of four years in the community of DeLisle, Mississippi. In one of the book’s many memorable scenes, Ward, as a young woman, watches her mother clean the mansion of 
a wealthy white family, while chatting to the wife—her mother’s employer—about what she’s learning in school. Ward and the wife lounge in the mansion’s sitting room, along with “the family’s parrot… kept in a four-foot high cage in a corner [as it] squawked and spread its wings.” As the wife speaks—from her inherited privilege—about the quality of Ward’s education, Ward’s gaze oscillates from her mother to the parrot, allowing for a heartbreaking and disarming overlap: “… I had trouble paying attention to the wife. Why was my mother so silent? Why did she seem so meek? I’d never seen any of that in her. My attention was split between two worlds… The parrot stretched its wings wide again, raising its beak to the air, stretching as if it would fly, but it settled. My mother pushed and the broom shushed its way around the cage.” After the wife eventually pays Ward’s college tuition, Ward reflects on the ways in which her “eventual ascent into another class, was born in the inexorable push of my mother’s hands,” and looming over this reflection is the powerful image of that caged parrot, acknowledging its wings before dropping them.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Matthew Gavin Frank’s new nonfiction book, Flight of the Diamond Smugglers, is about, among other things, the ways in which carrier pigeons were used by diamond smuggling rings in coastal South Africa.
