A vivid narrative history, packed with first-hand accounts, of the US Eighth Air Force's VIII Fighter Command from its foundation in 1942 through to its victory in the skies over Nazi Germany. On August 7, 1942, two events of major military importance occurred on separate sides of the planet. In the South Pacific, the United States went on the offensive, landing the First Marine Division at Guadalcanal. In England, 12 B-17 bombers of the new Eighth Air Force's 97th Bombardment Group bombed the Rouen–Sotteville railroad marshalling yards in France. While the mission was small, the aerial struggle that began that day would ultimately cost the United States more men killed and wounded by the end of the war in Europe than the Marines would lose in the Pacific War. Clean Sweep is the story of the creation, development and operation of the Eighth Air Force Fighter Command and the battle to establish daylight air superiority over the Luftwaffe so that the invasion of Europe could be successful. Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has had a lifelong interest in the history of the fighter force that defeated the Luftwaffe over Germany. He has collected many first-hand accounts from participants over the past 50 years, getting to know pilots such as the legendary “Hub” Zemke, Don Blakeslee and Chuck Yeager, as well as meeting and interviewing leading Luftwaffe pilots Adolf Galland, Gunther Rall and Walter “Count Punski” Krupinski. This story is told through accounts gathered from both sides.
Do you believe that you can consistently beat the stock market if you put in the effort? —that some people have extrasensory perception? —that crime and drug abuse in America are on the rise? Many people hold one or more of these beliefs although research shows that they are not true. And it’s no wonder since advertising and some among the media promote these and many more questionable notions. Although our creative problem-solving capacity is what has made humans the successful species we are, our brains are prone to certain kinds of errors that only careful critical thinking can correct. This enlightening book discusses how to recognize faulty thinking and develop the necessary skills to become a more effective problem solver. Author Thomas Kida identifies “the six-pack of problems” that leads many of us unconsciously to accept false ideas: · We prefer stories to statistics. · We seek to confirm, not to question, our ideas. · We rarely appreciate the role of chance and coincidence in shaping events. · We sometimes misperceive the world around us. · We tend to oversimplify our thinking. · Our memories are often inaccurate. Kida vividly illustrates these tendencies with numerous examples that demonstrate how easily we can be fooled into believing something that isn’t true. In a complex society where success—in all facets of life—often requires the ability to evaluate the validity of many conflicting claims, the critical-thinking skills examined in this informative and engaging book will prove invaluable.
If you’ve ever stared in awe at the Rocky Mountains and wondered how early travelers could possibly traverse those peaks, then this is the book for you! In a time of smartphones, GPS devices, and voice automated navigation systems, it’s difficult to imagine crossing unknown desserts, mountains, and prairies with just a few ancient techniques and the heavens above. This history of movement across the American West brings three centuries of travel to life. It shows how four different cultures, in four different areas, migrated across this harsh and beautiful land: the native travelers on foot, Spanish conquistadors on horseback, Frenchmen by canoe, and American settlers by wagon. In this history, the “who,” “where,” and “when” take a back seat to the fascinating “how.” How did they find their way from place to place? How did they measure time, distance, and direction traveled? How did they provide themselves with food, water, and shelter—the barest necessities of human existence? Travel the myth and reality of the raw land that made the American West. Discover the depth of human bravery, determination, and ingenuity. And enjoy the adventure.
Acclaimed historian and New York Times bestselling author Craig Shirley delivers a compelling account of 1945, particularly the watershed events in the month of April, that details how America emerged from World War II as a leading superpower. In the long-awaited follow-up to the widely praised December 1941,Craig Shirley's April 1945 paints a vivid portrait of America--her people, faith, economy, government, and culture. The year of 1945 bought a series of watershed events that transformed the country into an arsenal of democracy, one that no longer armed the world by necessity but henceforth protected the world by need. At the start of 1945, America and the rest of the world were grieving millions of lives lost in the global conflict. As President Roosevelt was sworn into his fourth term, optimism over an end to the bloody war had grown--then, in April, several events collided that changed the face of the world forever: the sudden death of President Roosevelt followed by Harry S. Truman's rise to office; Adolph Hitler's suicide; and the horrific discoveries of Dachau and Auschwitz. Americans doubled down on their completion of the atomic bomb and their plans to drop them on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the destruction ultimately leading the Japanese Empire to surrender on V-J day and ending World War II for good. Combining engaging anecdotes with deft research and details that are both diminutive and grand, April 1945 gives readers a front-row seat to the American stage at the birth of a brand-new world.
One Life at a Time is a chronicle of the ancestors of the author's children as they arrived in the New World, what propelled them from Britain, Ireland and Korea, and what happened to them and their descendants once they took root in America -- one life at a time. This crisp narrative focuses on the history and development of New England and its people while illuminating episodes of the American experience spanning more than three centuries as lived by ordinary people forging a New World
A moving, elegantly written, and exhaustively researched account of what it means for a girl to lose a father to death or divorce—with advice for fatherless daughters on how to cope. “People who lose their parents early in life are like fellow war veterans. As soon as they discover that they are talking to someone else who has lost a parent, they know they are speaking the same language without uttering a word.” Pamela Thomas gives voice to this unspoken pain in Fatherless Daughters. Still haunted by her own father’s death when she was ten, Thomas decided to explore its effects. Though her journey began as a personal one, she soon felt the need to hear from other women and ended up interviewing more than one hundred fatherless women. They ranged in age from nineteen to ninety-four; they came from all areas of the country as well as Europe and Asia; some had lost their fathers to death, others to divorce or abandonment. Each account was unique, but the impact of a father’s loss was profound in every woman’s life. Thomas begins by defining what it means to be a father in our world. She discusses the initial shock of his loss, exploring the aspects that color how a young girl experiences it: her age at the time of her father’s death or abandonment, her mother’s behavior and attitudes, her place in the family vis-à-vis siblings, and the influence of a stepfather or father-surrogates. Thomas shows how a father’s early death or abandonment affects a woman’s emotional health and self-esteem, her body image, her sexual experiences, her marriage, her family life, and her career. Perhaps most important, Thomas offers compassionate advice for coming to terms with father loss, even late in life, from actively mourning, to healing, to starting fresh.
Devine presents the most comprehensive collection of research done to date on the great aviation mystery. He believes he witnessed the burning of Earhart's Electra on Saipan in 1944, torched apparently on order of the US Secretary of the Navy.
Literary theory has been dominated by a mind/body dualism that often eschews the role of the body in reading. Focusing on reading as a physical practice, McLaughlin analyzes the role of the eyes, the hands, postures and gestures, bodily habits and other physical spaces, with discussions ranging from James Joyce to the digital future of reading.
Following the end of the Korean War, the prevailing myth in the West was that of the absolute supremacy of US Air Force pilots and aircraft over their Soviet-supplied opponents. The claims of the 10:1 victory-loss ratio achieved by the US Air Force fighter pilots flying the North American F-86 Sabre against their communist adversaries, among other such fabrications, went unchallenged until the end of the Cold War, when Soviet records of the conflict were finally opened. Packed with first-hand accounts and covering the full range of US Air Force activities over Korea, MiG Alley brings the war vividly to life and the record is finally set straight on a number of popular fabrications. Thomas McKelvey Cleaver expertly threads together US and Russian sources to reveal the complete story of this bitter struggle in the Eastern skies.
Many books have been written about the practice of peacemaking, and few, if any, contribute to the non-violent, spiritual side of this ancient science, discipline, practice and art form. This book speaks to that lack and explores the spiritual, non-violent element in peacemaking as it applies to appropriate dispute resolution and mediating family law disputes. This book is intended for the professional peacemaker, mediator, lawyer, law student, conciliator, and dispute neutral. People wishing to improve their own communication skills and strengthen their primary relationships will profit greatly from this book. Those in the family law field, will find much benefit from the peacemaking processes, family counseling psychology, Eastern philosophy and Yoga, collected wisdom, experience and practice pointers presented in Light on Peacemaking.
In this innovative resource guide, Thomas P. Walsh has compiled a unique collection of some 1,400 published and unpublished American musical compositions relating in some way to the Philippines during the American colonial era in the country from 1898 to 1946. In preparing the guide, Walsh surveyed a wide array of sources: published songs listed in WorldCat, the online catalogs of sheet music collections of university libraries and major public and private research libraries, bibliographic compilations of popular music, the periodical literature on music and popular culture, published collections of “soldier songs,” and sheet music listed for sale on commercial auction websites. In addition, for the first time in the preparation of a research bibliography, the guide also identifies, from song registrations in the US Copyright Office’s Catalog of Copyright Entries (CCE), 48 years of musical compositions relating to the Philippines. In systematically going through the CCE, year by year, Walsh discovered hundreds of unpublished songs written by average Americans expressing their varied views about historical events and their personal experiences relating to America’s distant colony in Southeast Asia. Of the 1,400 chronologically-listed songs included in the guide, most will be new materials for scholars and students alike to study. Songs like “Ma Little Cebu Maid,” “My Own Manila Sue,” “My Fillipino Belle,” “Down on the Philippine Isles,” “Beside the Pasig River,” “My Philippino Pearl,” and “I Want a Filipino Man” were all published and widely promoted by Tin Pan Alley and were performed on stage and listened to at home on records and piano rolls across America. The lyrics often illustrate popular American attitudes, from shrilly patriotic numbers about the Battle of Manila Bay and, later, the Fall of Bataan and Corregidor to wistful, romantic, and even charming reminiscences of happy days spent in “old” Manila to racially charged pieces rife with deprecating stereotypes of Filipinos. This guide reprints a number of these hard-to-find song lyrics, making them available to readers for the first time in over a century. In addition to including the lyrics to a number of the songs, the guide also provides copyright registration numbers and dates of registration for many of the published and unpublished songs. Also provided are some 700 “notes” on particular songs and over 750 links that provide direct access to bibliographic records or even digital copies of the sheet music in libraries and collections. Exhaustive in its scope, Tin Pan Alley and the Philippines is an invaluable research resource for scholars and students of American history, Pacific studies, popular culture, and ethnomusicology.
With the progress of artificial intelligence, the digitalization of the lifeworld, and the reduction of the mind to neuronal processes, the human being increasingly appears to be just a product of data and algorithms. That is, we conceive ourselves in the image of our machines, and conversely, we elevate our machines and our brains to new subjects. At the same time, demands for an enhancement of human nature culminate in transhumanist visions of taking human evolution to a new stage. Against this self-reification of the human being, this book defends a humanism of embodiment: our corporeality, vitality, embodied freedom are the foundations of a self-determined existence, which uses these new technologies only as a means, instead of letting them rule us. In Defence of the Human Being offers an array of interventions directed against a reductionist naturalism or transhumanism in various areas of science and society. As alternative it offers an embodied and enactive account of the human person: we are neither pure minds nor brains, but primarily embodied, living beings in relation with others. Fuchs applied this concept to issues such as artificial intelligence, transhumanism and enhancement, virtual reality, neuroscience, embodied freedom, psychiatry, and finally to the accelerating dynamics of current society which lead to an increasing disembodiment of our everyday conduct of life. Cutting across neuroscience, philosophy, and psychiatry, this important new book applies cutting-edge concepts of embodiment and enactivism to the current scientific, technological and cultural tendencies that will crucially influence our society's development in the 21st century.
The Allied landings at Dieppe in German-occupied France in August 1942 are one the most famous amphibious operations of the Second World War and many books have been written about them, mostly from the Allied point of view. The German side of the story has been neglected, and that is why Graham Thomas’s fresh account is so valuable. He reconstructs the immediate response of the Germans to the landings, gives a graphic detailed description of their actions throughout, and looks at the tactical and strategic lessons they drew from them. Each phase and aspect of the action is depicted using a broad range of sources including official reports, correspondence and recollections – the preliminary British commando attacks on the gun batteries, the landings themselves, the German defenses and preparations, and their counter-attacks, and the associated naval and air campaigns. The result is a finely balanced and incisive reassessment of this remarkable operation. It also offers the reader an engrossing account of one of the most dramatic episodes in the war in Western Europe.
Air Commodore Peter Malam 'Pete' Brothers CBE, DSO, DFC, and Bar (1917-2008) was one of the most heroic and highly praised pilots of the Second World War. Decorated extensively, he secured a total of 16 'kills' over the course of the conflict, with 10 of these occurring during the Battle of Britain. Pivotal moments in his career include the time, in August 1940, when his flight encountered around a hundred enemy aircraft, including Messerschmitt 110's; he led the flight in attack against them, and soon found himself in a stalled position, out of which he spun, only to be confronted by a Dornier 215, which he shot down, before later destroying a Messerschmitt 109. Scores of these kind of risky manoeuvres and winning victories punctuated a career defined by great courage, leadership and initiative in the face of fierce opposition. ??This new and engaging biography profiles a pilot who, until now, hasn't been the subject of such a thorough book-length study. The story of his career is incredibly entertaining, featuring a number of hair-raising episodes, and is sure to appeal to fans of aviation history as well as the more general reader seeking out an action-packed biography offering fresh insights into one of the most pivotal conflicts of the twentieth century.
This controversial, convincing, and highly original book is important reading for everyone concerned about the origins, present, and future of the American experiment in self-government.
Every student is a genius," declares author Thomas Armstrong, and an educator's most important job is to discover and nurture the "genius qualities" that all students were born with but that may no longer be obvious. Urging readers to look beyond traditional understandings of what constitutes genius, Armstrong describes 12 such qualities: curiosity, playfulness, imagination, creativity, wonder, wisdom, inventiveness, vitality, sensitivity, flexibility, humor, and joy. He cites research in various fields that supports this broader understanding of genius and explains how influences in the home, the popular media, and the school itself "shut down" the genius in students. Combining thoughtful insights and practical information, Armstrong offers guiding principles to help educators awaken genius in the classroom--beginning with awakening the genius in themselves. Readers will find dozens of suggested activities and helpful resources to provide "genius experiences" and create a "genial climate" in the classroom. In addition, suggestions for further study at the end of each section provide starting points for personal and professional reflection and growth. As it celebrates the potential brainpower waiting to be unlocked in classrooms everywhere, Awakening Genius in the Classroom inspires educators to look at their students from a different perspective and to reinvigorate their teaching with a new sense of excitement and possibility. The result, Armstrong concludes, could extend far beyond the classroom and transform not only our schools, but the entire world. Note: This product listing is for the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) version of the book.
Present day neuroscience places the brain at the centre of study. But what if researchers viewed the brain not as the foundation of life, rather as a mediating organ? Ecology of the Brain addresses this very question. It considers the human body as a collective, a living being which uses the brain to mediate interactions. Those interactions may be both within the human body and between the human body and its environment. Within this framework, the mind is seen not as a product of the brain but as an activity of the living being; an activity which integrates the brain within the everyday functions of the human body. Going further, Fuchs reformulates the traditional mind-brain problem, presenting it as a dual aspect of the living being: the lived body and the subjective body - the living body and the objective body. The processes of living and experiencing life, Fuchs argues, are in fact inextricably linked; it is not the brain, but the human being who feels, thinks and acts. For students and academics, Ecology of the Brain will be of interest to those studying or researching theory of mind, social and cultural interaction, psychiatry, and psychotherapy.
At last, a book that has what every atmospheric science and meteorology student should know about satellite meteorology: the orbits of satellites, the instruments they carry, the radiation they detect, and, most importantly, the fundamental atmospheric data that can be retrieved from their observations.Key Features* Of special interest are sections on:* Remote sensing of atmospheric temperature, trace gases, winds, cloud and aerosol data, precipitation, and radiation budget* Satellite image interpretation* Satellite orbits and navigation* Radiative transfer fundamentals
This proven, comprehensive resource covers every issue that affects Christian family life. It has been in print for over thirty years and has sold nearly 100,000 copies. This new edition is updated throughout with discussions of recent family-related issues. It includes a new chapter on work and family balance and a new section on the increasing role grandparents take in parental responsibilities.
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