Robert Neiman, perhaps the most experienced combat commander of the U.S. Marine Corps’ tank arm, was one of the rare USMC officers to serve in both Iwo Jima and Okinawa battles. In Tanks on the Beaches, Neiman and his coauthor, Kenneth Estes, relay vivid accounts of fighting in the Pacific War, as well as Marine Corps service during the entire World War II period, devoid of idolatry and mythmaking. The result is a war story told from the unique perspective of men fighting from armored machines in desperate battles against a determined enemy. After the capture of Guadalcanal, Neiman endured Japanese bombardments there to gather information for his assignment as operations officer of a new tank school being formed in California. He eventually led his own tank company through four island battles culminating in the cauldron of Iwo Jima. Later, he finished the war as executive officer and commanding officer of the 1st Tank Battalion on occupation and security duty in North China in 1945–46. Neiman and Estes take the reader from prewar training at Quantico and in North Carolina through the delights of a New Zealand bereft of men, the horrors of Saipan and Iwo, the peculiar situation in China after the war, and then the trip back to the States for Neiman’s successful postwar career as a lumber retailer. Through it all, Estes translates Neiman’s eye for the interesting and the human into a multifaceted tale of a young Marine going to war. This is an adventure story with many novel turns that will attract the interest of military experts, military history aficionados, Marine Corps members in general, and veterans of armored fighting vehicle units. Neiman is not a USMC icon, just one of the unheralded thousands of officers who did the real fighting. This is their story, as much as it is his.
Some of the bravest actions of journalists are unknown, obscured by the passage of time, hidden by veils of anonymity or buried by systematic repression. Profiles in Journalistic Courage corrects this imbalance. With few exceptions, the stories told in this collection are unfamiliar. In the words of Richard Whelan on Robert Capa's vision of the Spanish Civil War, these tales are drawn from the edge of things. Most of the people highlighted here are journalists who worked on the margins of popularity, who blazed new and solitary paths, and who left fleeting legacies. Courageous journalists were not always thanked for their pioneering efforts. Jealousy, political disagreements, and differing conceptions of journalism sometimes fueled criticism of some of those dealt with in this volume. To complicate the subject further, brave journalists do not always act for reasons that win popularity or acclaim. Actions with laudable consequences are sometimes the result of egoism, stubbornness and ignorance, no less than selflessness, prudence, and principle. These psychological dimensions are not avoided in these profiles. In "Yesterday" David Copeland examines the tangled legacy of the trial of John Peter Zenger. Graham Hodges unearths the story of David Ruggles, an African-American journalist and abolitionist. Pamela Newkirk recalls the life and work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Pierre Albert explores the journalism of the French Resistance. Bernard L. Stein and Hank Klibanoff describe the work and motives of the civil rights movement. The volume covers the journalism of commitment from Northern Ireland to Native American tribes. It closes with an extended essay by James Boylan on varied perspectives on different aspects of courage in journalism, from the capacity to resist threats to the courage to tell people what they may not want to hear or read. Robert Giles formerly editor in chief of Media Studies Journal, is curator of Harvard University's Nieman Foundation. Robert W. Snyder, the former editor is now professor of journalism at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Lisa DeLisle is senior editor of Media Studies Journal.
This book is both a personal and a philosophical autobiography of Robert S. Hartman, the creator of formal axiology. After experiencing first-hand the horrible effects of World War I and the beginnings of Nazism in Germany, Hartman wondered what could be done to organize goodness instead of badness - for a change. First, the concept of good must be defined. Next, different kinds of goodness, like intrinsic, extrinsic, and systemic, must be differentiated. Then this understanding must be used to comprehend and to change the world, including its economic, political, military, religious, educational, intellectual, and psychological dimensions. By telling his own story, Hartman gives his readers a glimpse of the form of the good and of a much better world.
From journalist Robert Timberg, a memoir of the struggle to reclaim his life after being severely burned as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. In January 1967, Robert Timberg was a short-timer, counting down the days until his combat tour ended. He had thirteen days to go when his vehicle struck a Viet Cong land mine, resulting in third-degree burns of his face and much of his body. He survived, barely, then began the arduous battle back, determined to build a new life and make it matter. Remarkable as was his return to health--he endured no less than thirty-five operations--perhaps more remarkable was his decision to reinvent himself as a journalist, one of the most public of professions. Blue-Eyed Boy is a gripping, occasionally comic account of what it took for an ambitious man, aware of his frightful appearance but hungry for meaning and accomplishment, to master a new craft amid the pitying stares and shocked reactions of many he encountered on a daily basis. Timberg was at the top of his game as White House correspondent for The Baltimore Sun when suddenly his work brought his life full circle: the Iran-Contra scandal broke. At its heart were three fellow Naval Academy graduates and Vietnam-era veterans. Timberg's coverage of that story resulted in his first book, The Nightingale's Song, a powerful work of narrative nonfiction that follows the three academy graduates most deeply involved in Iran-Contra--Oliver North among them--as well as two other well-known Navy men, John McCain and James Webb, from the academy through Vietnam and into the Reagan years. In Blue-Eyed Boy, Timberg relates how he came to know these five men and how their stories helped him understand the ways the Vietnam War and the furor that swirled around it continue to haunt the nation, even now, nearly four decades after its dismal conclusion. Timberg is no saint, and he has traveled a hard and often bitter road.
Written by a respected Western historian, here is the definitive account of the Texas Rangers, a vivid portrait of these legendary peace officers and their role in a changing West.
From the author of the critically acclaimed book The Nightingale Song comes an evocative and personal portrait of America during the time between the Good War and Vietnam. Reviving the powerful themes of courage, manhood, and loss, Robert Timberg returns for his second book with a strikingly personal exploration of the generation that split along the fault line known as Vietnam. Using as a backdrop the New York City sandlot football team he played for after high school, Timberg is able to evoke a devasting period in fine detail and vivid color as he tells the story of a troubled young boy that played running back growing into a strong man that attended the Naval Academy and set out to become a Marine officer.
“One of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer.” —The Sunday Times (London) From the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson: an unprecedented gathering of vivid, candid, deeply moving recollections about his experiences researching and writing his acclaimed books. Now in paperback, Robert Caro gives us a glimpse into his own life and work in these evocatively written, personal pieces. He describes what it was like to interview the mighty Robert Moses and to begin discovering the extent of the political power Moses wielded; the combination of discouragement and exhilaration he felt confronting the vast holdings of the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas; his encounters with witnesses, including longtime residents wrenchingly displaced by the construction of Moses' Cross-Bronx Expressway and Lady Bird Johnson acknowledging the beauty and influence of one of LBJ's mistresses. He gratefully remembers how, after years of working in solitude, he found a writers' community at the New York Public Library, and details the ways he goes about planning and composing his books. Caro recalls the moments at which he came to understand that he wanted to write not just about the men who wielded power but about the people and the politics that were shaped by that power. And he talks about the importance to him of the writing itself, of how he tries to infuse it with a sense of place and mood to bring characters and situations to life on the page. Taken together, these reminiscences--some previously published, some written expressly for this book--bring into focus the passion, the wry self-deprecation, and the integrity with which this brilliant historian has always approached his work.
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