The day before the daredevil stunt pilot, Black Jack Hosmer, crashed fatally in front of an air show crowd, he launched his 12-year-old son, Lori, into his own risky aerobatics, declaring him "The world's youngest pilot!" Joining the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1939, he became a military test pilot then led an 8th Air Force Bomb Group toward smashing Hitler's ambitions to conquer all of Europe. His ingenious, unorthodox attacks against the Germans forced the American authorities to either jail him or give him another medal. Lori Hosmer crossed paths and swords with military leaders but recruited President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to sanction his wild-eyed tactics. After volunteering to obtain Nazi secrets to protect Eisenhower's D-Day invasion, Lori's spectacular victory celebration led the British allies to doubt the sanity of American flyers.
The fascinating story of how Ronald Reagan, self-proclaimed "sagebrush rebel," took his revolutionary energy policies to Washington and revitalized the American economy. Governor Reagan, with his unbridled faith in American ingenuity, creativity, and know-how and his confidence in the free-enterprise system, believed the United States would “transcend” the Soviet Union. To do so, however, President Reagan had to revive and revitalize an American economy reeling from a double-digit trifecta (unemployment, inflation, and interest rates), and he knew the economy could not grow without reliable sources of energy that America had in abundance. The environmental movement was in its ascendancy and had persuaded Congress to enact a series of well-intentioned laws that posed threats of great mischief in the hands of covetous bureaucrats, radical groups, and activist judges. A conservationist and an environmentalist, Ronald Reagan believed in being a good steward. More than anything else, however, he believed in people; specifically, for him, people were part of the ecology as well. That was where the split developed. William Perry Pendley, a former member of the Reagan administration and author of some of Reagan's most sensible energy and environmental policies, tells the gripping story of how Reagan fought the new wave of anti-human environmentalists and managed to enact laws that protected nature while promoting the prosperity and freedom of man—saving the American economy in the process.
William Taylor's Cavalier and Yankee was one of the most famous works of American history written in the 1960s. The book is an intellectual history of the South before the Civil War, the perception of it in the North, and the effect it had upon the nation in the years from 1800 to 1860. First published in 1961 and out of print for several years, Taylor's classic study remains essential to the study of the pre-Civil War South.
This lively, intimate, sometimes disrespectful, but always knowledgeable history of the Bollingen Foundation confirms its pervasive influence on American intellectual life. Conceived by Paul and Mary Mellon as a means of publishing in English the collected works of C. G. Jung, the Foundation broadened to encompass scholarship and publication in a remarkable number of fields. Here are wonderful portraits of the central figures, including the Mellons, Jung himself, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, D. T. Suzuki, Natacha Rambova, Vladimir Nabokov, Gershom Scholem, Herbert Read, and Kurt and Helen Wolff.
Ten hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, “another Pearl Harbor” of even more devastating consequence for American arms occurred in the Philippines, 4,500 miles to the west. On December 8, 1941, at 12.35 p.m., 196 Japanese Navy bombers and fighters crippled the largest force of B-17 four-engine bombers outside the United States and also decimated their protective P-40 interceptors. The sudden blow allowed the Japanese to rule the skies over the Philippines, removing the only effective barrier that stood between them and their conquest of Southeast Asia. This event has been called “one of the blackest days in American military history.” How could the army commander in the Philippines—the renowned Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur—have been caught with all his planes on the ground when he had been alerted in the small hours of that morning of the Pearl Harbor attack and warned of the likelihood of a Japanese strike on his forces? In this book, author William H. Bartsch attempts to answer this and other related questions. Bartsch draws upon twenty-five years of research into American and Japanese records and interviews with many of the participants themselves, particularly survivors of the actual attack on Clark and Iba air bases. The dramatic and detailed coverage of the attack is preceded by an account of the hurried American build-up of air power in the Philippines after July, 1941, and of Japanese planning and preparations for this opening assault of its Southern Operations. Bartsch juxtaposes the experiences of staff of the U.S. War Department in Washington and its Far East Air Force bomber, fighter, and radar personnel in the Philippines, who were affected by its decisions, with those of Japan’s Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo and the 11th Air Fleet staff and pilots on Formosa, who were assigned the responsibility for carrying out the attack on the Philippines five hundred miles to the south. In order to put the December 8th attack in broader context, Bartsch details micro-level personal experiences and presents the political and strategic aspects of American and Japanese planning for a war in the Pacific. Despite the significance of this subject matter, it has never before been given full book-length treatment. This book represents the culmination of decades-long efforts of the author to fill this historical gap.
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