D.G. Martin

What happens to a promising young athlete’s career when it comes to an end earlier than expected or hoped? In major college athletics – football, basketball, and possibly baseball – almost every player hopes for a chance to play in the pros. Most won’t get it. Will the educational experience given in exchange for the play prepare these athletes as well or better for a life of work and service than the other alternatives available to them? Wiley Cash’s new novel gives a painful look at one case involving the life of a promising athlete who tried an alternate...

“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.” These words from Isaiah 6:8 inspired the daughter of a pre-Civil-War Southern slaveholder to travel to Africa as the wife of a Baptist missionary to bring the Word of the Lord to the Yoruba people in what is now Nigeria. Those real facts are the basis of North Carolina State University Professor Elaine Neil Orr’s fictional account, A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa. Putting aside the irony of Americans from a region where millions of Africans were enslaved taking a...

What could you learn from a trip down the Cape Fear River? Starting, say, at a few miles below Jordan Lake where Haw River joins Deep River to form the Cape Fear, canoeing downstream and passing by Raven Rock State Park before reaching the bridge at Lillington, getting through three sets of dams and locks, all the way to Fayetteville. Then, with the rapids behind you, switching to a powerboat to follow the river as it passes by Elizabethtown, on the way to Wilmington and into the ocean beyond Bald Head Island. What would you learn on such a...

Famed Chapel Hill author Elizabeth Spencer has proved a North Carolina rule again. “Ninety is the new 60.” Or 50. Spencer, like academic leader William Friday and historian John Hope Franklin a few years earlier, shows that the nineties can be incredibly productive years. The evidence in Spencer’s case is her latest book of short fiction, Starting Over, which was released on January 1st. Spencer is 92. Six of the book’s nine stories were written by her in the last three years, proving that her talents and work ethic are still strong. Spencer is best known, perhaps, for her...

When politics is the topic, there is always more to talk about. So it is with the book on North Carolina politics that was the subject of a recent column. I keep going back to East Carolina University Professor Tom Eamon’s The Making of a Southern Democracy: North Carolina Politics from Kerr Scott to Pat McCrory. Why does the book keep drawing me back to it? One reason is its positive attention to political figures whose contributions have sometimes been underrated. For instance, Dan K. Moore, whose service as governor from 1965 through 1969 is, according to Eamon, often...

Just in time for the new year, a new book puts modern North Carolina politics in perspective. The Making of a Southern Democracy: North Carolina Politics from Kerr Scott to Pat McCrory, by East Carolina University Professor Tom Eamon, covers North Carolina and its politics from 1948 through last year’s election. These 65-plus years have been transformative for our state in many ways: socially, economically, educationally, and politically. It is the politics that Eamon seeks to explain. But the social and economic changes drove many of the political changes. So did national political changes. By bringing all these factors...

Do people in North Carolina remember Thomas Wolfe, their once famous son, author of Look Homeward, Angel, whose books helped many of us get through the transformation from childhood to adulthood and opened the door to an appreciation of fine writing? Do his words still inspire new writers to open their mental guts and spill out their words and stories? For answers to those questions, I decided to play a “Where’s Waldo?” type game and look for Wolfe in recent North Carolina-related books to see if I could find any evidence of his continuing influence. In What I Came...