Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download War and the Arc of Human Experience PDF full book. Access full book title War and the Arc of Human Experience by Glenn Petersen. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Glenn Petersen Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0761872361 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
Glenn Petersen flew seventy combat missions in Vietnam when he was nineteen, launching from an aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf. He’d sought out the weighty responsibilities and hazardous work. But why? What did the cultural architecture of the society he grew up in have to do with the way he went to war? In this book he looks at the war from an anthropological perspective because that’s how he’s made his living in all the subsequent years: it’s how he sees the world. While anthropologists write about the military and war these days, they do so from the perspective of researchers. What makes this a fully original contribution is that Petersen brings to the page the classic methodology of ethnographers, participant observation—a kind of total immersion. He writes from the dual perspectives of an insider and a researcher and seeks in the specifics of lived experience some larger conclusions about humans’ social lives in general. Petersen was long oblivious to what had happened to him in Vietnam and he fears that young men and women who’ve been fighting the US military’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might be similarly unaware of what’s happened to them. Skills that allowed him to survive in combat, in particular his ability to focus tightly on the challenges directly in front of him, seemed to transfer well to life after war. The same intensity led him to a successful academic career, including the time he represented the Micronesian islands at the United Nations;how could anything be wrong? Then surreptitiously,the danger, the stress, and the trauma he’d hidden away broke through a brittle shell and the war came spilling out. As an anthropologist he sees in this a classic pattern: an adaptation to one set of conditions is put to a new and practical use when conditions change, but in time what had once been beneficial turns into maladaptive behavior. In writing about why we fight, he shed lights on what the fighting does to us.
Author: Glenn Petersen Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 0761872361 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
Glenn Petersen flew seventy combat missions in Vietnam when he was nineteen, launching from an aircraft carrier in the Tonkin Gulf. He’d sought out the weighty responsibilities and hazardous work. But why? What did the cultural architecture of the society he grew up in have to do with the way he went to war? In this book he looks at the war from an anthropological perspective because that’s how he’s made his living in all the subsequent years: it’s how he sees the world. While anthropologists write about the military and war these days, they do so from the perspective of researchers. What makes this a fully original contribution is that Petersen brings to the page the classic methodology of ethnographers, participant observation—a kind of total immersion. He writes from the dual perspectives of an insider and a researcher and seeks in the specifics of lived experience some larger conclusions about humans’ social lives in general. Petersen was long oblivious to what had happened to him in Vietnam and he fears that young men and women who’ve been fighting the US military’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq might be similarly unaware of what’s happened to them. Skills that allowed him to survive in combat, in particular his ability to focus tightly on the challenges directly in front of him, seemed to transfer well to life after war. The same intensity led him to a successful academic career, including the time he represented the Micronesian islands at the United Nations;how could anything be wrong? Then surreptitiously,the danger, the stress, and the trauma he’d hidden away broke through a brittle shell and the war came spilling out. As an anthropologist he sees in this a classic pattern: an adaptation to one set of conditions is put to a new and practical use when conditions change, but in time what had once been beneficial turns into maladaptive behavior. In writing about why we fight, he shed lights on what the fighting does to us.
Author: Azar Gat Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199236631 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 839
Book Description
Why do people go to war? Is it rooted in human nature or is it a late cultural invention? And what of war today: is it a declining phenomenon or simply changing its shape? This book sets out to find definitive answers to these questions in an attempt to unravel the riddle of war throughout human history.
Author: Karl Marlantes Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic ISBN: 0802195148 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
“A precisely crafted and bracingly honest” memoir of war and its aftershocks from the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn (The Atlantic). In 1968, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. In his thirteen-month tour he saw intense combat, killing the enemy and watching friends die. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his experiences. In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes takes a candid look at these experiences and critically examines how we might better prepare young soldiers for war. In the past, warriors were prepared for battle by ritual, religion, and literature—which also helped bring them home. While contemplating ancient works from Homer to the Mahabharata, Marlantes writes of the daily contradictions modern warriors are subject to, of being haunted by the face of a young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters, and of how he finally found a way to make peace with his past. Through it all, he demonstrates just how poorly prepared our nineteen-year-old warriors are for the psychological and spiritual aspects of the journey. In this memoir, the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn offers “a well-crafted and forcefully argued work that contains fresh and important insights into what it’s like to be in a war and what it does to the human psyche” (The Washington Post).
Author: Lidia Yuknavitch Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0062383299 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 227
Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book • BuzzFeed 50 Books We Can’t Wait to Read this Year • New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • National Bestseller “Brilliant and incendiary.” — Jeff VanderMeer, New York Times Book Review "Stunning. . . . Yuknavitch understands that our collective narrative can either destroy or redeem us, and the outcome depends not just on who’s telling it, but also on who’s listening.” — O, The Oprah Magazine “[A] searing fusion of literary fiction and reimagined history and science-fiction thriller and eco-fantasy.” — NPR Books The bestselling author of The Small Backs of Children offers a vision of our near-extinction and a heroine—a reimagined Joan of Arc—poised to save a world ravaged by war, violence, and greed, and forever change history In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head: the surviving humans have become sexless, hairless, pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin. Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic and bloodthirsty cult leader who turns CIEL into a quasi-corporate police state. A group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule—galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses a mysterious force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies turn Joan into a martyr, the consequences are astonishing. And no one—not the rebels, Jean de Men, or even Joan herself—can foresee the way her story and unique gift will forge the destiny of an entire world for generations. A riveting tale of destruction and love found in the direst of places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience—Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan raises questions about what it means to be human, the fluidity of sex and gender, and the role of art as a means for survival.
Author: Tony Ballantyne Publisher: Duke University Press Books ISBN: 9781478009764 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
As modern European empires expanded, written language was critical to articulations of imperial authority and justifications of conquest. For imperial administrators and thinkers, the non-literacy of “native” societies demonstrated their primitiveness and inability to change. Yet as the contributors to Indigenous Textual Cultures make clear through cases from the Pacific Islands, Australasia, North America, and Africa, indigenous communities were highly adaptive and created novel, dynamic literary practices that preserved indigenous knowledge traditions. The contributors illustrate how modern literacy operated alongside orality rather than replacing it. Reconstructing multiple traditions of indigenous literacy and textual production, the contributors focus attention on the often hidden, forgotten, neglected, and marginalized cultural innovators who read, wrote, and used texts in endlessly creative ways. This volume demonstrates how the work of these innovators played pivotal roles in reimagining indigenous epistemologies, challenging colonial domination, and envisioning radical new futures. Contributors. Noelani Arista, Tony Ballantyne, Alban Bensa, Keith Thor Carlson, Evelyn Ellerman, Isabel Hofmeyr, Emma Hunter, Arini Loader, Adrian Muckle, Lachy Paterson, Laura Rademaker, Michael P. J. Reilly, Bruno Saura, Ivy T. Schweitzer, Angela Wanhalla
Author: Trent Hone Publisher: Naval Institute Press ISBN: 1682472949 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
Learning War examines the U.S. Navy’s doctrinal development from 1898–1945 and explains why the Navy in that era was so successful as an organization at fostering innovation. A revolutionary study of one of history’s greatest success stories, this book draws profoundly important conclusions that give new insight, not only into how the Navy succeeded in becoming the best naval force in the world, but also into how modern organizations can exploit today’s rapid technological and social changes in their pursuit of success. Trent Hone argues that the Navy created a sophisticated learning system in the early years of the twentieth century that led to repeated innovations in the development of surface warfare tactics and doctrine. The conditions that allowed these innovations to emerge are analyzed through a consideration of the Navy as a complex adaptive system. Learning War is the first major work to apply this complex learning approach to military history. This approach permits a richer understanding of the mechanisms that enable human organizations to evolve, innovate, and learn, and it offers new insights into the history of the United States Navy.
Author: C. J. Chivers Publisher: Simon & Schuster ISBN: 1451676662 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 400
Book Description
The harrowing account of US soldiers caught in America’s forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that The New York Times calls “relentless...a classic of war reporting,” by Pulitzer Prize winner and former Marine C.J. Chivers. More than 2.7 million Americans have served in Afghanistan or Iraq since September 11, 2001, and C.J. Chivers reported on both wars from their beginnings. The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a corpsman, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant. Chivers captures their courage, commitment, sense of purpose, and ultimately their suffering, frustration, and moral confusion as new enemies arise and invasions give way to counterinsurgency duties for which American forces were often not prepared. The Fighters is a “gripping, unforgettable” (The Boston Globe) portrait of modern warfare. Told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran, The Fighters is “a masterful work of atmospheric reporting, and it’s a book that will have every reader asking—with varying degrees of urgency or anger or despair—the final question Chivers himself asks: ‘How many lives had these wars wrecked?’” (Christian Science Monitor).
Author: Karl Marlantes Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc. ISBN: 0802197167 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 616
Book Description
Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever. Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.
Author: John Scalzi Publisher: Tor Books ISBN: 1466802316 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 339
Book Description
Following the events of The Last Colony, John Scalzi tells the story of the fight to maintain the unity of the human race. The people of Earth now know that the human Colonial Union has kept them ignorant of the dangerous universe around them. For generations the CU had defended humanity against hostile aliens, deliberately keeping Earth an ignorant backwater and a source of military recruits. Now the CU's secrets are known to all. Other alien races have come on the scene and formed a new alliance—an alliance against the Colonial Union. And they've invited the people of Earth to join them. For a shaken and betrayed Earth, the choice isn't obvious or easy. Against such possibilities, managing the survival of the Colonial Union won't be easy, either. It will take diplomatic finesse, political cunning...and a brilliant "B Team," centered on the resourceful Lieutenant Harry Wilson, that can be deployed to deal with the unpredictable and unexpected things the universe throws at you when you're struggling to preserve the unity of the human race. Being published online from January to April 2013 as a three-month digital serial, The Human Division will appear as a full-length novel of the Old Man's War universe, plus—for the first time in print—the first tale of Lieutenant Harry Wilson, and a coda that wasn't part of the digital serialization. Old Man's War Series #1 Old Man’s War #2 The Ghost Brigades #3 The Last Colony #4 Zoe’s Tale #5 The Human Division #6 The End of All Things Short fiction: “After the Coup” Other Tor Books The Android’s Dream Agent to the Stars Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded Fuzzy Nation Redshirts Lock In The Collapsing Empire (forthcoming) At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Author: Andrew X. Pham Publisher: Crown ISBN: 0307381218 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 322
Book Description
One of the Ten Best Books of the Year, Washington Post Book World One of the Los Angeles Times’ Favorite Books of the Year One of the Top Ten National Books of 2008, Portland Oregonian A 2009 Honor Book of the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association “Few books have combined the historical scope and the literary skill to give the foreign reader a sense of events from a Vietnamese perspective. . . . Now we can add Andrew Pham’s Eaves of Heaven to this list of indispensable books.” —New York Times Book Review “Searing . . . vivid–and harrowing . . . Here is war and life through the eyes of a Vietnamese everyman.” —Seattle Times Once wealthy landowners, Thong Van Pham’s family was shattered by the tumultuous events of the twentieth century: the French occupation of Indochina, the Japanese invasion during World War II, and the Vietnam War. Told in dazzling chapters that alternate between events in the past and those closer to the present, The Eaves of Heaven brilliantly re-creates the trials of everyday life in Vietnam as endured by one man, from the fall of Hanoi and the collapse of French colonialism to the frenzied evacuation of Saigon. Pham offers a rare portal into a lost world as he chronicles Thong Van Pham’s heartbreaks, triumphs, and bizarre reversals of fortune, whether as a South Vietnamese soldier pinned down by enemy fire, a prisoner of the North Vietnamese under brutal interrogation, or a refugee desperately trying to escape Vietnam after the last American helicopter has abandoned Saigon. This is the story of a man caught in the maelstrom of twentieth-century politics, a gripping memoir told with the urgency of a wartime dispatch by a writer of surpassing talent.
Author: Glenn Petersen
Author: Glenn Petersen
Author: Azar Gat
Author: Karl Marlantes
Author: Lidia Yuknavitch
Author: Tony Ballantyne
Author: Trent Hone
Author: C. J. Chivers
Author: Karl Marlantes
Author: John Scalzi
Author: Andrew X. Pham