Race riots aboard Navy ships carrying weapons of mass destruction.

Imagine that.  On U. S. Navy ships, oil tankers and aircraft carriers, racial unrest rose to the level of riot. Black sailors trying to hurt white sailors; white sailors trying to hurt black sailors; sometimes these riots happened at sea during Vietnam wartime operations.  Most of this racial unrest occurred from 1970 to 1976.

I served in the U.S. Navy from June 1972 to March 1976.  In fact, as a sailor with Air Anti-Submarine Squadron 27 (VS-27), I was on board the USS Intrepid (CVS 11) during the race riot of January 1973. 5,000 men, on a ship carrying warplanes and tons of munitions; while at sea there were some black sailors and some white sailors randomly attacking each other by race.

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Hannibal Barca has been raised from the dead.

All I can remember from my high school history is that Hannibal was an African general who used elephants to fight the Roman Empire. My ignorance is, apparently, not uncommon. Recently a friend told me that as far as she remembered from high school, Hannibal was a figure of folklore.  Thankfully, then, with his outstanding historical novel, Pride of Carthage (Doubleday), David Anthony Durham has resurrected the real Hannibal from the darkness of poor high school teaching to the light of this day.

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John Ed Bradley and I grew up in the same Louisiana small town; Opelousas.  Yet we have never met. The reason John Ed and I had no chance to meet is race.  John Ed is white of Cajun heritage, and I am a black-Creole.  Where John Ed would have gone either to the all-white (until 1968) Catholic school or the all-white (until 1970) public school, I went to the all-black Catholic school.  John Ed would have lived in one of the white sections of Opelousas, and I in one of the black sections. But to this racial structure John Ed was not oblivious.  He could not have been and have written his book, “Restoration,” which is a captivating, mysterious, rare novel of diversity.

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Sometimes you should read a book just because it is well written.  A book with carefully crafted sentences, with drama in its presentation, with poetry in its rhythm is a book that will take you on a trip you do not expect, to a destination you would not have chosen.

I have just read a book like that and I read it only because I thought it would be well written. I got that feeling about this book when I read the title; “Beethoven’s Hair.”  I was intrigued. How could someone, I wondered, write a whole book about Beethoven’s hair; how much could there be to write about?  But now I was curious, so I did what I usually do when I am browsing in a bookstore and a book catches my attention.  I read the first sentence.

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Here’s the thing.  Some of you are going to your classes, working to become Chemists, Mathematicians, Engineers, Computer Scientists, but in your heart you want to be a writer.  To hide this from yourself you have probably told yourself, “I’ll never make a living at that.” Or the one person you revealed your secret to said “You’ll never make a living at that.”  But the truth is simple.  You want to be a writer.  You know you want too.

Here’s another thing.  I have never read a Stephen King novel.  I grew up in a home where everybody read. He had little formal education but Daddy read the newspaper like it was a sacred text and he read books on the history of WW II.  Momma read novels.  There were always books in our house.  So like my sister and brothers, I became a reader and read everything; comic books, science fiction, general fiction novels, biographies, mysteries. But Stephen King I never read.  Yet something about his book On Writing intrigued me.

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