As a young elephant learns the ways of the world from his herd’s matriarch, 18 year old American Owen Dorner travels to Africa to meet his father for the first time. Plunged into the corrupt underworld of Colonel Mubego, a conniving prison warden and former revolutionary fighter, Owen seeks friendship amongst unlikely allies and finds meaning in the world of elephants.
Biologist Wanjeri Mubego, the colonel’s niece who is happier among the wildlife in her native Kenya than with people, helps Owen discover the truth about his father, Karl. A U.S. Army captain, Karl Dorner has lived in a dusty African prison cell since Owen was a small boy.
Could Karl, accused of helping a local rebellion, be a hero, and not a traitor? Karl isn’t telling.
In a moving portrayal of elephant civilization parallel tales of intrigue and survival unfold, masterfully enriching our understanding of what it means to be human.
About the author
Rick Hodges is a writer and author whose written works are as diverse as his life experiences.
Rick enjoys a deep appreciation for the natural world on a simple, introspective level, informed as much by digging in the dirt as a child or beekeeping as a teenager as by travels to great landscapes. A voyage to East Africa, and the experience of seeing how the people there lived in tandem with wildlife, inspired his novel, To Follow Elephants.
His daytime career as a writer for non-profit groups and journalist in Washington, DC, has given Rick the chance to write about a wide variety of topics and experiences. Government, politics and business issues have all crossed his desk, of course, in the form of news items, fundraising appeals, speeches and congressional testimony. But his published portfolio also includes a nonfiction instructional book for high school students about the Muslim world, an article about the best way to make coffee that appeared in the Washington Post Food section, a humorous essay about raising a child with a disability, an article about airline collision avoidance systems he wrote after riding on a demonstration flight involving his plane flying head-on at another, and a story about a town that united to make a dying boy’s last day the best of his life, among many others.
Aside from his 9-to-5 writing, Rick has produced fictional works, including short stories and a stage play. He wrote his play, Three Generations of Imbeciles, based on a 1927 court case from his home state of Virginia that cleared the way for involuntary sterilization of people with disabilities for decades before the practice was outlawed.
Rick’s wife, Elenor, is executive director of a local environmental organization and inspired him to work for a time as a grant proposal writer for The Wilderness Society. In his current job, Rick writes magazine copy for a national labor union. He lives with Elenor and his two daughters in Arlington, Virginia.
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