Contact: Jim Dobkins
“The novel is based on my experience while in the U.S. Air Force. The action is fictitious but versions of the same did happen. The Russian sections of the book are also fictitious, but again based on history. The names in most of the novel are not actual except for Russian leaders which is history.
“I spent six years writing the novel then put it in my closet for another six years until my daughter Diane — also an author — demanded that she should read it. The book was written in “TIME WORKS” a long-gone word processing system, thus she took the paper manuscript and retyped the entire 700 or so pages.”
He was many things:
The son of an American Sioux Indian and a Ukranian mother.
Master spy for the Soviet KGB; privy to the internal workings of the Soviet Union’s Politburo.
Ace fighter pilot in the Korean, Vietnam and Soviet Afghanistan wars.
And a man with boundless, shared love and devotion with the beautiful Japanese-Russian Eiko Haraoka.
In a similar vein to Forest Gump, De Villers’ 199,000-word epic novel also presents an intriguing slice of history, only in this case as seen through the eyes of Yuri Danilov. The effectiveness of De Villers’ major effort is his research ability that brings up memories of the thorough research Tom Clancy was known for in putting his many bestsellers together.
Danilov’s mother had a close relationship with the Nikita Khrushchev family. Danilov had involvements with the infamous U-2 spy plane, the Cuban missile crisis, and crossed paths with notable figures, including Bobby Kennedy, Premier Anastas Miloyan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsen, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Chuck Yeager and other notable aviation figures.
Yuri Danilov’s memoirs give an inside view of the deadly political intrigue during Soviet government secret changes. The USSR was a closed society, thus most of these events were never known to the Soviet people or the world.