A Clash of Cymbals

A Clash of Cymbals PDF Author: James Blish
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 9780099086604
Category : Science fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 199

Book Description


Flight Path

Flight Path PDF Author: David Hill
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand Limited
ISBN: 0143770535
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
A gripping novel for young adults that captures both the daring and the everyday realities of serving in the Air Force during the Second World War. Pete and Paul yelled together. 'Bandit! Nine o'clock! Bandit!' Jack spun to stare. There was the Messerschmitt on their left, streaking straight at them. Eighteen-year-old Jack wanted to escape boring little New Zealand. But he soon finds that flying in a Lancaster bomber to attack Hitler’s forces brings terror as well as excitement. With every dangerous mission, he becomes more afraid that he’ll never get back alive. He wants to help win the war, but will he lose his own life? My Brother’s War: '... there are stories that need to be told over and over again, to introduce a new generation of readers to important ideas and to critical times in their country's history ... Hill's descriptions of trench warfare are unforgettable.' from the Judges' Report of the New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults 2013

Children of the Flying City

Children of the Flying City PDF Author: Jason Sheehan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593109511
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
“Richly imagined and emotionally resonant, Children of the Flying City is a fantasy for young and old alike. This book gave my heart wings.” –Pierce Brown, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Red Rising “Children of the Flying City feels, at once, timeless and wondrously, gloriously new.” –Katie Williams, author of Tell the Machine Goodnight Brought to the flying city of Highgate when he was only five years old, orphan Milo Quick has never known another home. Now almost thirteen, Milo survives one daredevil grift at a time, relying only on his wit, speed, and best friends Jules and Dagda. A massive armada has surrounded Highgate’s crumbling armaments. Because behind locked doors—in opulent parlors and pneumatic forests and a master toymaker’s workshop—the once-great flying city protects a powerful secret, hidden away for centuries. A secret that’s about to ignite a war. One small airship, the Halcyon, has slipped through the ominous blockade on a mission to collect Milo—and the rich bounty on his head—before the fighting begins. But the members of the Halcyon’s misfit crew aren’t the only ones chasing Milo Quick. True friendship is worth any risk in this clever, heart-racing adventure from award-winning author and journalist Jason Sheehan. Sheehan weaves together wry narration and multiple points of view to craft a richly imagined tale that is dangerous and surprising, wondrous and joyful.

Free Flight

Free Flight PDF Author: James Fallows
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786741759
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
The troubles of the airline system have become acute in the post-terrorist era. As the average cost of a flight has come down in the last twenty years, the airlines have survived by keeping planes full and funneling traffic through a centralized hub-and-spoke routing system. Virtually all of the technological innovation in airplanes in the last thirty years has been devoted to moving passengers more efficiently between major hubs. But what was left out of this equation was the convenience and flexibility of the average traveler. Now, because of heightened security, hours of waiting are tacked onto each trip. As James Fallows vividly explains, a technological revolution is under way that will relieve this problem. Free Flight features the stories of three groups who are inventing and building the future of all air travel: NASA, Cirrus Design in Duluth, Minnesota, and Eclipse Aviation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. These ventures should make it possible for more people to travel the way corporate executives have for years: in small jet planes, from the airport that's closest to their home or office directly to the airport closest to where they really want to go. This will be possible because of a product now missing from the vast array of flying devices: small, radically inexpensive jet planes, as different from airliners as personal computers are from mainframes. And, as Fallows explains in a new preface, a system that avoids the congestion of the overloaded hub system will offer advantages in speed, convenience, and especially security in the new environment of air travel.

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight PDF Author: Eric Avila
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520248112
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Book Description
"In Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight, Eric Avila offers a unique argument about the restructuring of urban space in the two decades following World War II and the role played by new suburban spaces in dramatically transforming the political culture of the United States. Avila's work helps us see how and why the postwar suburb produced the political culture of 'balanced budget conservatism' that is now the dominant force in politics, how the eclipse of the New Deal since the 1970s represents not only a change of views but also an alteration of spaces."—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Skyfaring

Skyfaring PDF Author: Mark Vanhoenacker
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385351828
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what we—both as pilots and as passengers—are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.

Impossible Heights

Impossible Heights PDF Author: Adnan Morshed
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145294296X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 401

Book Description
The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and ‘30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In Impossible Heights, Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment. The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss’s Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into “master builders,” these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension. By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular “superman” discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America’s propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.

Who's Your City?

Who's Your City? PDF Author: Richard Florida
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307372138
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
International Bestseller All places are not created equal. In this groundbreaking book, Richard Florida shows that where we live is increasingly a crucial factor in our lives, one that fundamentally affects our professional and personal prospects. As well as explaining why place matters now more than ever, Who’s Your City? provides indispensable tools to help you choose the right place for you. It’s a cliché of the information age that globalization has made place irrelevant, that one can telecommute as effectively from New Zealand as New York. But it’s not true, Richard Florida argues, relying on twenty years of innovative research in urban studies, creativity, and demographic trends. In fact, as new units of economic growth called mega-regions become increasingly specialized, the world is becoming more and more “spiky” — divided between flourishing clusters of talent, education and competitiveness, and moribund “valleys.” All these places have personalities, Richard Florida explains in the second half of Who’s Your City?, and happiness depends on finding the city in which you can balance your personal and career goals to thrive. More people than ever before now have the opportunity to choose where to live, but at different points in our lives we need different kinds of places, he points out — what a couple of recent college graduates want from their city isn’t necessarily what a retiree is looking for. You have to find the place that suits you best: a boho-burb neighbourhood isn’t likely to be the best fit for patio man. So, for the first time, Who’s Your City? ranks cities by their fitness for various life stages, rating the best places for singles, young families, and empty nesters. It summarizes the key factors that make place matter to different kinds of people, from professional opportunities to the closeness of family to how well it matches their lifestyle, and provides an in-depth series of steps to help you choose the right place wisely. Sparkling with Richard Florida’s signature intellectual originality, Who’s Your City? moves from insights to studies to personal anecdotes, from a startling “Singles Map” of the United States to surprising data on the difference aesthetics makes to people’s sense of place. A perceptive and transformative book, it is both a brilliant exploration of the fundamental importance of place and an essential guide to making what may be the most important decision of your life.

White Flight/Black Flight

White Flight/Black Flight PDF Author: Rachael A. Woldoff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801461030
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
Urban residential integration is often fleeting—a brief snapshot that belies a complex process of racial turnover in many U.S. cities. White Flight/Black Flight takes readers inside a neighborhood that has shifted rapidly and dramatically in race composition over the last two decades. The book presents a portrait of a working-class neighborhood in the aftermath of white flight, illustrating cultural clashes that accompany racial change as well as common values that transcend race, from the perspectives of three groups: white stayers, black pioneers, and "second-wave" blacks. Rachael A. Woldoff offers a fresh look at race and neighborhoods by documenting a two-stage process of neighborhood transition and focusing on the perspectives of two understudied groups: newly arriving black residents and whites who have stayed in the neighborhood. Woldoff describes the period of transition when white residents still remain, though in diminishing numbers, and a second, less discussed stage of racial change: black flight. She reveals what happens after white flight is complete: "Pioneer" blacks flee to other neighborhoods or else adjust to their new segregated residential environment by coping with the loss of relationships with their longer-term white neighbors, signs of community decline, and conflicts with the incoming second wave of black neighbors. Readers will find several surprising and compelling twists to the white flight story related to positive relations between elderly stayers and the striving pioneers, conflict among black residents, and differences in cultural understandings of what constitutes crime and disorder.

Earthman, Come Home

Earthman, Come Home PDF Author: James Blish
Publisher: London, Faber
ISBN:
Category : Science fiction, American
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
"When the cities left Earth, they exchanged a simple environment for one of constant, sometimes shattering change. The Universe was littered with cultures in every conceivable stage of development. Only the iron hand of the germanium-backed economy and occasional interventions by the Earth police imposed some kind of order on the spaceways. Even John Amalfi never got used to the life - and he had been mayor of New York for nearly five hundred years now."--Goodreads.com