Bullheaded Black Remembers Alexander

About the Book

Before there was Islam, there was Alexander. Before there was Christianity, there was Alexander. This is the story of Alexander the Great's invasion of the Middle East and of his astonishing effort to unite the civilized world under a central government designed to promote peace and international trade. This is the story of one man's courageous determination to advance freedom of religion and racial equality in Egypt, Mesopotamia [Iraq today], Asia Minor [Turkey], Persia [Iran], and Bactria [Afghanistan].

Why let Bucehpalus, or Oxhead (the horse Alexander rode during the ten years of the conquest) tell this story? Because by using the famous stallion (or Bullheaded Black, as I call him) as the narrator, it allows me to cut the story to the bone, to cover the main facts of Alexander's life, but also to inject a little common sense, or horse sense, if you will, about the major influences upon Alexander's ideas and motivations: the obvious influence, for example, of his father and mother, and the less obvious influence of Aristotle, who was his personal tutor for three or four years when Alexander was a teenager.

This is a basic story: basic biography, basic world history, and basic geography. This is also the story of Alexander's idea for a better world. His dream perished with him in Babylon, when he unexpectedly died in 323BC at the tender age of 33. In fact, a comprehensive dream like his, incorporating religious freedom and racial equality, did not flower profusely again until 1776 in America, and did not shoot promising tendrils forward again in Iraq and Afghanistan until the United States of America's preemptive strikes in the 21st Century. What would Alexander say to us today about disputes over religion and the various gods of the world's great faiths? Read this book! You will be surprised!

About the Author

First flutist in the Ogden High School ROTC band without ever playing a note. ("The band has to look complete at the football games," Philip Dalby insisted.) Worshipped Thelma Reynolds, who gave me an A in Latin after seeing me weep for failing my high school algebra examinations. For two years I joined those who couldn't get enough of Lucille Chambers, who liberally doused us with Shakespeare, Dostoyevski, W.H. Hudson, Thomas Mann and Tasso. When I was eighteen I burned myself with fuming sulfuric acid in college organic chemistry and dropped out of premed. Lived for two years in New Zealand, on a Mormon mission, sometimes staying with the Maoris on their reservations in remote spots of nowhere--wild green mansions by the sea with names like Punaruku. Majored in English at Brigham Young University and joined the faculty for a decade while studying toward the PhD at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Utah. Taught adult education classes for many years at the McCune mansion in Salt Lake City and taught private classes, popular with civic leaders, on Milton's Paradise Lost. Reluctantly, I gave up teaching in 1972 for a more lucrative career, spending the next twenty years as an officer in the Mortgage Division of First Security Bank of Utah, retiring in 1994 to be with family and friends under the hot, blue skies of Arizona. Inebriated with time, sunshine, freedom and reflections upon world history, I have written two books: Bullheaded Black Remembers Alexander and The Earth Mother's Image, a title inspired by the art work of Judith Phillips. This last novel is still looking for the light of day.