This book is out-of-print and that fact is a sad commentary on the public's taste and publisher's motivations. A sensitive young man survives both a hard-line jet-jockey father and air force academy discipline to find himself on a lethal climb in Iran where his only guide may be in the service of the Shah's intelligence agents. There, abandoned and near death in a terrible blizzard, Dante Diamond hears the voices of ancient Persian Sufi poets and follows them off the mountain. This is a powerful first novel that can be enjoyed by anyone who understands, as did the Persians, that a man can be at once a warrior and a poet--and a better man than either.

I read this book back in 1990, and I was quite surprised by it. I thought it was going to be a bland story about a guy raising birds, but it turned out to be a story about an air force officer trying to find himself. ... It is definately worth a read