Author: Douglas Bauer Publisher: University of Iowa Press ISBN: 1609382684 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 379
Book Description
Luther Mathias sells “snake oil” in scrubby West Texas dirt towns. He learns that substance is never a substitute for style and eventually develops his own remedies that promise to cure any ailment a man might suffer. In time, his imagination and ambition combine to mold him into medicine’s version of Elmer Gantry: loved and hated, imponderably wealthy and famous, powerful and pursued. The Very Air is a compelling exploration of human motives and hidden meanings. It is a detailed picture of America’s myth of the rugged individual in the psychological and narrative tradition of The Great Gatsby and Citizen Kane. With a resonant sense of the period and culture, Douglas Bauer evokes the freewheeling feel of the old Southwest in the charlatans of our own era. The Very Air shows, through storytelling both exhilarating and chilling, that the past is prologue and that our personal histories indeed shape the course of our individual futures.
Author: General Giulio Douhet Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing ISBN: 1782898522 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 620
Book Description
In the pantheon of air power spokesmen, Giulio Douhet holds center stage. His writings, more often cited than perhaps actually read, appear as excerpts and aphorisms in the writings of numerous other air power spokesmen, advocates-and critics. Though a highly controversial figure, the very controversy that surrounds him offers to us a testimonial of the value and depth of his work, and the need for airmen today to become familiar with his thought. The progressive development of air power to the point where, today, it is more correct to refer to aerospace power has not outdated the notions of Douhet in the slightest In fact, in many ways, the kinds of technological capabilities that we enjoy as a global air power provider attest to the breadth of his vision. Douhet, together with Hugh “Boom” Trenchard of Great Britain and William “Billy” Mitchell of the United States, is justly recognized as one of the three great spokesmen of the early air power era. This reprint is offered in the spirit of continuing the dialogue that Douhet himself so perceptively began with the first edition of this book, published in 1921. Readers may well find much that they disagree with in this book, but also much that is of enduring value. The vital necessity of Douhet’s central vision-that command of the air is all important in modern warfare-has been proven throughout the history of wars in this century, from the fighting over the Somme to the air war over Kuwait and Iraq.
Author: Paul Kalanithi Publisher: Random House ISBN: 1473523494 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
**THE MILLION COPY BESTSELLER** 'Rattling. Heartbreaking. Beautiful,' Atul Gawande, bestselling author of Being Mortal What makes life worth living in the face of death? At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally into a patient and a new father. Paul Kalanithi died while working on this profoundly moving book, yet his words live on as a guide to us all. When Breath Becomes Air is a life-affirming reflection on facing our mortality and on the relationship between doctor and patient, from a gifted writer who became both. 'A vital book about dying. Awe-inspiring and exquisite. Obligatory reading for the living' Nigella Lawson
Author: H. Leonard Thorne Publisher: The History Press ISBN: 0752497286 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 278
Book Description
‘I hold the greatest respect for Len for what he achieved in the RAF’. – Gordon Mitchell, son of Spitfire designer R.J. Mitchell In May 1940, 20-year-old Len Thorne joined the RAF, as did many young men during the Second World War. After two hectic tours of operational duty as a fighter pilot, including some desperately dangerous low-level flying at Dunkirk, he was posted to AFDU (Air Fighting Development Unit) and remained there as a test pilot for the rest of the war. Fortunately for us, Len kept a detailed diary, which, set alongside his log book, tells the unique story of a test pilot tasked with developing operational tactics and testing captured enemy aircraft, such as the feared Fw 190. During Len’s career, he worked alongside some of the most famous fighter aces and his records cast light on some of the most famous flyers of the RAF, including Wing Commander Al Deere and Spitfire aces Squadron Leader ‘Paddy’ Finucane, Ernie Ryder and many others. A unique record of military aviation history, From Spitfire to Focke Wulf offers a window to this era of rapid and high-stakes aircraft development.
Author: Jeff VanderMeer Publisher: FSG Originals ISBN: 0374710775 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 209
Book Description
A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE FROM ALEX GARLAND, STARRING NATALIE PORTMAN AND OSCAR ISAAC The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that "reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world" (Kim Stanley Robinson). Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide; the third expedition in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding—but it's the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.
Author: Margareta Ingrid Christian Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022676480X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
Margareta Ingrid Christian unpacks the ways in which, around 1900, art scholars, critics, and choreographers wrote about the artwork as an actual object in real time and space, surrounded and fluently connected to the viewer through the very air we breathe. Theorists such as Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the choreographer Rudolf Laban drew on the science of their time to examine air as the material space surrounding an artwork, establishing its “milieu,” “atmosphere,” or “environment.” Christian explores how the artwork’s external space was seen to work as an aesthetic category in its own right, beginning with Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that Rodin’s sculpture “exhales an atmosphere” and that Cezanne’s colors create “a calm, silken air” that pervades the empty rooms where the paintings are exhibited. Writers created an early theory of unbounded form that described what Christian calls an artwork’s ecstasis or its ability to stray outside its limits and engender its own space. Objects viewed in this perspective complicate the now-fashionable discourse of empathy aesthetics, the attention to self-projecting subjects, and the idea of the modernist self-contained artwork. For example, Christian invites us to historicize the immersive spatial installations and “environments” that have arisen since the 1960s and to consider their origins in turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetics. Throughout this beautifully written work, Christian offers ways for us to rethink entrenched narratives of aesthetics and modernism and to revisit alternatives.
Author: Marshall Berman Publisher: Verso ISBN: 9780860917854 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 388
Book Description
The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.
Author: Douglas Bauer
Author: General Giulio Douhet
Author: Paul Kalanithi
Author: H. Leonard Thorne
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Author: Jeff VanderMeer
Author: Margareta Ingrid Christian
Author: Marshall Berman
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