Toni Morrison 2012 novel ( HOME ) -- read at West Point Military Academy Class

from NY TIMES dot-com / At War blog -- March 24, 2013

At West Point, Morrison Gets at Truths of War in Fiction

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Seated with members of the African-American Arts Forum at West Point, Ms. Morrison ate her Army-issue ravioli and prepared to read from her most recent novel, Home, to the freshman cadets, who studied the book in English class this semester.
The novel is the story of Frank Money, a black Georgia native and Korean War veteran struggling to reintegrate into civilian life in a segregated America, while struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I read Home last winter and immediately saw that the text touched on so many relevant topics, such as PTSD, as well as race,” explained Lt. Col. Scott Chancellor, who directs West Point’s freshman English program and called Ms. Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner, “the greatest living American writer.” [Abigail Meisel reporting]

It was Lieutenant Colonel Chancellor who invited Ms. Morrison to speak. But exploring the costs of war is not foreign to the school’s curriculum, said Col. Scott Krawczyk, the head of the academy’s English and philosophy programs, who taught Home to a section of first-year cadets. (Other works on the syllabus were by Franz Kafka and Sylvia Plath.)
“At West Point we ensure that cadets are made to struggle with moral ambiguity so that when they confront tangled scenarios, they will be able to do that well,” Colonel Krawczyk said, referring to their future as officers. “Morrison gives us just enough psychological complication of Frank Money to open up an understanding of how desperately malignant the realm of war can be.”