Ward Just took time off from the editorial page of The Washington Post to write his first novel, A Soldier of the Revolution, the story of a young man who is sent to South America to work for an American corporation and finds himself drawn into a local insurgency movement. Michael Reardon, easygoing and contemplative, passes his days in the high plateau of a South American country gathering information that disappears into the maw of a cosmetics company's scholarly foundation. His slow, easy, and aimless life is interrupted when he is kidnapped by a ragtag bunch of guerillas who plan to hijack the local radio station and broadcast to the local Indians news of the impending revolution. All of the hallmarks and concerns of Just's fiction are evident in A Soldier of the Revolution. The nature of integrity, the American imperial experience, and the often curious circumstances of fate are all addressed in Just's intelligent, graceful style.