Nigeria, March 15 -- The Loyalist: A Memoir of Service and Sacrifice by Bolaji Abdullahi is a riveting, thought-provoking work. A narrative cobbled together in a span of 287 pages, it is a book that not only provides the missing links to tissues of recent Nigerian political history, it breaks boundaries of assumptions, and explores the delicate frontiers of loyalty to political principals. It breaks boundaries without wielding a digger, says a lot in taciturn prose and performs cremation on widely held assumptions and personalities without an outward appearance of flame or ashes.

It is a 13-chapter book written in a nonlinear narrative technique. Rather than the usual traditional chronological order of narrations which curves from the be...