Download or read book The Last Cruise written by Kate Christensen and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1950s ocean liner Queen Isabella is making her final voyage—a retro cruise from Long Beach to Hawaii and back—before heading to the scrapyard. For the guests on board, it’s a chance to experience a bygone era of decadent luxury, complete with fine dining, classic highballs, string quartets, and sophisticated jazz. Smoking is allowed but not cell phones—or children, for that matter. But this is the second decade of an uncertain new millennium, not the sunny, heedless mid-twentieth century, and certain disquieting signs of strife and malfunction above and below deck intrude on the festivities, throwing a trio of strangers together in an unexpected and startling test of character.

Download or read book States of Ireland written by Conor Cruise O'Brien and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2015-02-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written in 1972 in the wake of Bloody Sunday and direct rule, States of Ireland was Conor Cruise O'Brien's searching analysis of contemporary Irish nationalism: part-memoir, part-history, part-polemic. 'If The Great Melody (1992) is O'Brien's major academic work, States of Ireland is the one that will endure as a vital moment in Irish intellectual and political history.' Roy Foster, Standpoint ' States of Ireland [is] a book which influenced a generation. [O'Brien] saw that partition, while scarcely desirable in itself, recognized the reality of two different communities in the island, and that the Dublin state's formal irredentist claim on Northern Ireland was undemocratic and even imperialistic, as well as insincere. The republican ideology to which most Irish people paid lip service was a shirt of Nessus, he later wrote: "it clings to us and burns".' Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Download or read book Topgun Days written by Dave Baranek and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dave Baranek (callsign "Bio") was one of 451 young men to receive his Wings of Gold in 1980 as a naval flight officer. Four years later, seasoned by intense training and deployments in the tense confrontations of the cold war, he became the only one of that initial group to rise to become an instructor at the navy's elite Fighter Weapons School. As a Topgun instructor, Bio was responsible for teaching the navy's and Marine Corps's best fighter pilots how to be even better. He schooled them in the classroom and then went head-to-head with them in the skies. Then, in August 1985, Bio was assigned to combine his day-to-day flight duties with participation in a Pentagon-blessed project to film action footage for a major Hollywood movie focusing on the lives, loves, heartbreaks, and triumphs of young fighter pilots: Top Gun. Bio soon found himself riding in limousines to attend gala premieres, and being singled out by giggling teenagers and awed schoolboys who recognized the name "Topgun" on his T-shirts. The book ends with his reflections on his career as a skilled naval aviator and his enduring love of flight.

Download or read book Dallas 1963 written by Bill Minutaglio and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2013-05-28 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the months and weeks before the fateful November 22nd, 1963, Dallas was brewing with political passions, a city crammed with larger-than-life characters dead-set against the Kennedy presidency. These included rabid warriors like defrocked military general Edwin A. Walker; the world's richest oil baron, H. L. Hunt; the leader of the largest Baptist congregation in the world, W.A. Criswell; and the media mogul Ted Dealey, who raucously confronted JFK and whose family name adorns the plaza where the president was murdered. On the same stage was a compelling cast of marauding gangsters, swashbuckling politicos, unsung civil rights heroes, and a stylish millionaire anxious to save his doomed city. Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis ingeniously explore the swirling forces that led many people to warn President Kennedy to avoid Dallas on his fateful trip to Texas. Breathtakingly paced, Dallas 1963 presents a clear, cinematic, and revelatory look at the shocking tragedy that transformed America. Countless authors have attempted to explain the assassination, but no one has ever bothered to explain Dallas-until now. With spellbinding storytelling, Minutaglio and Davis lead us through intimate glimpses of the Kennedy family and the machinations of the Kennedy White House, to the obsessed men in Dallas who concocted the climate of hatred that led many to blame the city for the president's death. Here at long last is an accurate understanding of what happened in the weeks and months leading to John F. Kennedy's assassination. Dallas 1963 is not only a fresh look at a momentous national tragedy but a sobering reminder of how radical, polarizing ideologies can poison a city-and a nation. Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction Named one of the Top 3 JFK Books by Parade Magazine. Named 1 of The 5 Essential Kennedy assassination books ever written by The Daily Beast. Named one of the Top Nonfiction Books of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews.

Download or read book All the Drowned Sailors written by Raymond B. Lech and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hachi Nana Go written by Gary T. O'Neil and published by Gary O'Neil. This book was released on 2010-02-11 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This complete 28 year history of a commissioned Navy Destroyer (USS Henry W. Tucker DD-875) was a member of the "Asiatic Squadron. The Title HACHI NANA GO is Japanese for the hull number 875. Stationed in Yokosuka and visiting many ports of call, the crew would hear the familiar "Hey Hachi Nana Go" from Bar owners and shop keepers as they would go into town on Liberty.

Download or read book Mythologies written by Roland Barthes and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This new edition of MYTHOLOGIES is the first complete, authoritative English version of the French classic, Roland Barthes's most emblematic work"--

Download or read book USS Hancock written by and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 1999-06-15 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Adventures on the Queen Mary written by James Radford and published by . This book was released on 2015-01-02 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 16 year old British lad, Dave Wooders, gets a job in 1957 as a bellboy on the super liner Queen Mary.

Download or read book Going Clear written by Lawrence Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower comes “an utterly necessary story” (The Wall Street Journal) that pulls back the curtain on the church of Scientology: one of the most secretive organizations at work today. • The Basis for the HBO Documentary. Scientology presents itself as a scientific approach to spiritual enlightenment, but its practices have long been shrouded in mystery. Now Lawrence Wright—armed with his investigative talents, years of archival research, and more than two hundred personal interviews with current and former Scientologists—uncovers the inner workings of the church. We meet founder L. Ron Hubbard, the highly imaginative but mentally troubled science-fiction writer, and his tough, driven successor, David Miscavige. We go inside their specialized cosmology and language. We learn about the church’s legal attacks on the IRS, its vindictive treatment of critics, and its phenomenal wealth. We see the church court celebrities such as Tom Cruise while consigning its clergy to hard labor under billion-year contracts. Through it all, Wright asks what fundamentally comprises a religion, and if Scientology in fact merits this Constitutionally-protected label.

Download or read book Deep Freeze written by Dian Olson Belanger and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2019-04-01 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A comprehensive and lively book about the people and events that transformed Antarctica into an international laboratory for science.”—Raimund E. Goerler, Chief Archivist/Byrd Polar Research Center of The Ohio State University In Deep Freeze, Dian Olson Belanger tells the story of the pioneers who built viable communities, made vital scientific discoveries, and established Antarctica as a continent dedicated to peace and the pursuit of science, decades after the first explorers planted flags in the ice. In the tense 1950s, even as the world was locked in the Cold War, U.S. scientists, maintained by the Navy’s Operation Deep Freeze, came together in Antarctica with counterparts from eleven other countries to participate in the International Geophysical Year (IGY). On July 1, 1957, they began systematic, simultaneous scientific observations of the south-polar ice and atmosphere. Their collaborative success over eighteen months inspired the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, which formalized their peaceful pursuit of scientific knowledge. Still building on the achievements of the individuals and distrustful nations thrown together by the IGY from mutually wary military, scientific, and political cultures, science prospers today and peace endures. Belanger draws from interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official records to weave together the first thorough study of the dawn of Antarctica’s scientific age. Deep Freeze offers absorbing reading for those who have ventured onto Antarctic ice and those who dream of it, as well as historians, scientists, and policy makers. “[A] highly informative and readable narrative account of perhaps the single most striking international scientific endeavor of the twentieth century.” —The Polar Record “Deep Freeze, based on countless interviews and painstaking research, is a timely and gripping account.” —John C. Behrendt, author of Innocents on the Ice

Download or read book Emergency War Plan written by Sean M. Maloney and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-02 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emergency War Plan examines the theory and practice of American nuclear deterrence and its evolution during the Cold War. Previous examinations of nuclear strategy during this time have, for the most part, categorized American efforts as "massive retaliation" and "mutually assured destruction," blunt instruments to be casually dismissed in favor of more flexible approaches or summed up in inflammatory and judgmental terms like "MAD." These descriptors evolved into slogans, and any nuanced discussion of the efficacy of the actual strategies withered due to a variety of political and social factors. Drawing on newly released weapons effects information along with new information about Soviet capabilities as well as risky and covert espionage missions, Emergency War Plan provides a completely new examination of American nuclear deterrence strategy during the first fifteen years of the Cold War, the first such study since the 1980s. Ultimately what emerges is a picture of a gargantuan and potentially devastating enterprise that was understood at the time by the public in only the vaguest terms but that was not as out of control as has been alleged and was more nuanced than previously understood.

Download or read book The Flight Jacket written by and published by . This book was released on 1937 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A World Without Ice written by Henry Pollack Ph.D. and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize offers a clear-eyed explanation of the planet’s imperiled ice. Much has been written about global warming, but the crucial relationship between people and ice has received little focus—until now. As one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, Henry Pollack provides an accessible, comprehensive survey of ice as a force of nature, and the potential consequences as we face the possibility of a world without ice. A World Without Ice traces the effect of mountain glaciers on supplies of drinking water and agricultural irrigation, as well as the current results of melting permafrost and shrinking Arctic sea ice—a situation that has degraded the habitat of numerous animals and sparked an international race for seabed oil and minerals. Catastrophic possibilities loom, including rising sea levels and subsequent flooding of lowlying regions worldwide, and the ultimate displacement of millions of coastal residents. A World Without Ice answers our most urgent questions about this pending crisis, laying out the necessary steps for managing the unavoidable and avoiding the unmanageable.

Download or read book Submarine written by Tom Clancy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2003-05-06 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only the author of The Hunt for Red October could capture the reality of life aboard a nuclear submarine. Only a writer of Mr. Clancy's magnitude could obtain security clearance for information, diagrams, and photographs never before available to the public. Now, every civilian can enter this top secret world...the weapons, the procedures, the people themselves...the startling facts behind the fiction that made Tom Clancy a #1 bestselling author.

Download or read book The Last Ship written by William Brinkley and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-11-27 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as “an extraordinary novel of men at war” (The Washington Post) this is the book that inspired the TNT television series starring Eric Dane, Rhona Mitra, Adam Baldwin and Michael Bay as Executive Producer. The unimaginable has happened. The world has been plunged into all-out nuclear war. Sailing near the Arctic Circle, the U.S.S. Nathan James is relatively unscathed, but the future is grim and Captain Thomas is facing mutiny from the tattered remnants of his crew. With civilization in ruins, he urges those that remain—one-hundred-and-fifty-two men and twenty-six women—to pull together in search of land. Once they reach safety, however, the men and women on board realize that they are earth’s last remaining survivors—and they’ve all been exposed to radiation. When none of the women seems able to conceive, fear sets in. Will this be the end of humankind?

Download or read book The Ticket Out written by Helen Knode and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2012-04-17 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ann Whitehead is sick of her job. She's a movie critic for a counterculture rag in Los Angeles and she needs a break badly. Instead of a break, she gets a murder. A woman dies in Ann's bathtub: the victim is a film school grad and Industry hopeful. It's the kind of story Ann was born to write, but the disgraced LAPD detective leading the investigation is determined to stop her. The search for the killer turns into a search for the victim's missing script, the story of another woman murdered in 1944. Suddenly there are two killers, and a complicated conspiracy spanning decades. Ann is smack in the middle and everyone she meets wants into the film business--whatever the price. There's never been a thriller hitched as brilliantly to the underbelly of Hollywood as this one. Helen Knode is a startling and original voice.