Terrestrials Author:Paul West In the beginning are two United States Air Force spy-plane pilots. Booth and Clegg, the elite of an elite, men confident of their skills, men who know each other as well as they know themselves. Or so they think. When their spy plane inexplicably plummets from the sky over Saharan Africa, the two find themselves thrust onto a j... more »ourney to the far poles of late-twentieth-century human experience, to places where all comfortable givens--like "friendship" and "duty"--quickly fall away. Booth and Clegg, it turns out, have not the slightest idea who theyare, much less who the other is, but as we watch them struggle with their own contingency, with disorienting shifts in the pressuriation of time and space, we learn an astonishing amount about who we are, as Americans, as terrestrials. Along the way, we are brought by one of our greatest living writers into the emrace of his most magnificent and tender dream so far, a majestic account of the trials and ceaselessly surprising consolations of two extraordinary, ordinary men.« less