Download or read book A Mad Wicked Folly written by Sharon Biggs Waller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-01-23 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Edwardian London, a girl dreams of being an artist, despite her family's disapproval. Welcome to the world of the fabulously wealthy in London, 1909, where dresses and houses are overwhelmingly opulent, social class means everything, and women are taught to be nothing more than wives and mothers. Into this world comes seventeen-year-old Victoria Darling, who wants only to be an artist—a nearly impossible dream for a girl. After Vicky poses nude for her illicit art class, she is expelled from her French finishing school. Shamed and scandalized, her parents try to marry her off to the wealthy Edmund Carrick-Humphrey. But Vicky has other things on her mind: her clandestine application to the Royal College of Art; her participation in the suffragette movement; and her growing attraction to a working-class boy who may be her muse—or may be the love of her life. As the world of debutante balls, corsets, and high society obligations closes in around her, Vicky must figure out: just how much is she willing to sacrifice to pursue her dreams?

Download or read book A Short History of Nuclear Folly written by Rudolph Herzog and published by Melville House. This book was released on 2013-04-30 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spirit of Dr. Strangelove and The Atomic Café, a blackly sardonic people’s history of atomic blunders and near-misses revealing the hushed-up and forgotten episodes in which the great powers gambled with catastrophe Rudolph Herzog, the acclaimed author of Dead Funny, presents a devastating account of history’s most irresponsible uses of nuclear technology. From the rarely-discussed nightmare of “Broken Arrows” (40 nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War) to “Operation Plowshare” (a proposal to use nuclear bombs for large engineering projects, such as a the construction of a second Panama Canal using 300 H-Bombs), Herzog focuses in on long-forgotten nuclear projects that nearly led to disaster. In an unprecedented people’s history, Herzog digs deep into archives, interviews nuclear scientists, and collects dozens of rare photos. He explores the “accidental” drop of a Nagasaki-type bomb on a train conductor’s home, the implanting of plutonium into patients’ hearts, and the invention of wild tactical nukes, including weapons designed to kill enemy astronauts. Told in a riveting narrative voice, Herzog—the son of filmmaker Werner Herzog—also draws on childhood memories of the final period of the Cold War in Germany, the country once seen as the nuclear battleground for NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, and discusses evidence that Nazi scientists knew how to make atomic weaponry . . . and chose not to.

Download or read book The Ghost of Follonsbee s Folly written by Florence Hightower and published by . This book was released on 1958 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Stackpole family moves into an old Gothic mansion. They un-earth its history and make a new friend.

Download or read book The March of Folly written by Barbara W. Tuchman and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 1985-02-12 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the World War I masterpiece The Guns of August, grapples with her boldest subject: the pervasive presence, through the ages, of failure, mismanagement, and delusion in government. Drawing on a comprehensive array of examples, from Montezuma’s senseless surrender of his empire in 1520 to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Barbara W. Tuchman defines folly as the pursuit by government of policies contrary to their own interests, despite the availability of feasible alternatives. In brilliant detail, Tuchman illuminates four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain’s George III, and the United States’ own persistent mistakes in Vietnam. Throughout The March of Folly, Tuchman’s incomparable talent for animating the people, places, and events of history is on spectacular display. Praise for The March of Folly “A glittering narrative . . . a moral [book] on the crimes and follies of governments and the misfortunes the governed suffer in consequence.”—The New York Times Book Review “An admirable survey . . . I haven’t read a more relevant book in years.”—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Boston Sunday Globe “A superb chronicle . . . a masterly examination.”—Chicago Sun-Times

Download or read book The Folly and the Glory written by Tim Weiner and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Tim Weiner, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, an urgent and gripping account of the 75-year battle between the US and Russia that led to the election and impeachment of an American president With vivid storytelling and riveting insider accounts, Weiner traces the roots of political warfare—the conflict America and Russia have waged with espionage, sabotage, diplomacy and disinformation—from 1945 until 2020. America won the cold war, but Russia is winning today. Vladimir Putin helped to put his chosen candidate in the White House with a covert campaign that continues to this moment. Putin’s Russia has revived Soviet-era intelligence operations gaining ever more potent information from—and influence over—the American people and government. Yet the US has put little power into its defense. This has put American democracy in peril. Weiner takes us behind closed doors, illuminating Russian and American intelligence operations and their consequences. To get to the heart of what is at stake and find potential solutions, he examines long-running 20th-century CIA operations, the global political machinations of the Soviet KGB, the erosion of American political warfare after the cold war, and how 21st-century Russia has kept the cold war alive. The Folly and the Glory is an urgent call to our leaders and citizens to understand the nature of political warfare—and to change course before it’s too late.

Download or read book Folly written by Laurie R. King and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2002-05-28 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An acclaimed master of suspense creates a heroine you will never forget in this superbly chilling novel of a woman who begins a desperate undertaking that may transform her life--or end it. WHAT HAPPENS IF YOUR WORST FEARS AREN’T ALL IN YOUR MIND? Rae Newborn is a woman on the edge: on the edge of sanity, on the edge of tragedy, and now on the edge of the world. She has moved to an island at the far reaches of the continent to restore the house of an equally haunted figure, her mysterious great-uncle; but as her life begins to rebuild itself along with the house, his story starts to wrap around hers. Powerful forces are stirring, but Rae cannot see where her reality leaves off and his fate begins. Fifty-two years old, Rae must battle the feelings that have long tormented her--panic, melancholy, and a skin-crawling sense of watchers behind the trees. Before she came here, she believed that most of the things she feared existed only in her mind. And who can say, as disturbing incidents multiply, if any of the watchers on Folly Island might be real? Is Rae paranoid, as her family and the police believe, or is the threat real? Is the island alive with promise--or with dangers? With Folly, award-winning author LAURIE R. KING once again powerfully redefines psychological suspense on a sophisticated and harrowing new level, and proves why legions of readers and reviewers have named her a master of the genre.

Download or read book The Praise of Folly written by Desiderius Erasmus and published by . This book was released on 1913 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Folly of the World written by Jesse Bullington and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a stormy night in 1421, the North Sea delivers a devastating blow to Holland: the Saint Elizabeth Flood, a deluge of biblical proportions that drowns hundreds of towns, thousands of people, and forever alters the geography of the Low Countries. Where the factions of the noble Hooks and the merchant Cods waged a literal class war but weeks before, there is now only a nigh-endless expanse of grey water, a desolate inland sea with moldering church spires jutting up like sunken tombstones. For a land already beleaguered by generations of civil war, a worse disaster could scarce be imagined. Yet even disaster can be profitable, for the right sort of individual, and into this flooded realm sail three conspirators: a deranged thug at the edge of madness, a ruthless conman on the cusp of fortune, and a half-feral girl balanced between them. With The Folly of the World, Jesse Bullington has woven an extraordinary new tale of the depraved and the desperate.

Download or read book The Folly of Revolution written by S. Scott Rohrer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-03-20 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this penetrating biography of Thomas Bradbury Chandler, S. Scott Rohrer takes readers deep into the intellectual world of a leading loyalist who defended monarchy, rejected rebellion and democracy, and opposed the American Revolution. Talented, hardworking, and erudite, this Anglican minister from New Jersey possessed one of the Church of England’s most outstanding minds. Chandler was an Anglican leader in the 1760s and a key strategist in the effort to strengthen the American church in the years preceding the Revolution. He headed the campaign to create an Anglican bishopric in America—a cause that helped inflame tensions with American radicals unhappy with British policies. And, in the 1770s, his writings provided some of the most trenchant criticisms of the American revolutionary movement, raising fundamental questions about obedience, subordination, and rebellion that undercut Whig assertions about republicanism and popular control. Working from Chandler’s library catalog and other primary sources, Rohrer digs into Chandler’s political and religious beliefs, exploring their origins and the events in British history that shaped them. An intriguing and thoughtful reappraisal of a consequential figure in early American history, this biography will captivate students, scholars, and lay readers interested in politics and religion in Revolutionary-era America.

Download or read book Plowman s Folly written by Edward H. Faulkner and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2015-01-06 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mr. Faulkner’s masterpiece is recognized as the most important challenge to agricultural orthodoxy that has been advanced in this century. Its new philosophy of the soil, based on proven principles and completely opposed to age-old concepts, has had a strong impact upon theories of cultivation around the world. It was on July 5, 1943, when Plowman’s Folly was first issued, that the author startled a lethargic public, long bemused by the apparently insoluble problem of soil depletion, by saying, simply, “The fact is that no one has ever advanced a scientific reason for plowing.” With the key sentence, he opened a new era.For generations, our reasoning about the management of the soil has rested upon the use of the moldboard plow. Mr. Faulkner proved rather conclusively that soil impoverishment, erosion, decreasing crop yields, and many of the adverse effects following droughts or periods of excessive rainfall could be traced directly to the practice of plowing natural fertilizers deep into the soil. Through his own test-plot and field-scale experiments, in which he prepared the soil with a disk harrow, in emulation of nature’s way on the forest floor and in the natural meadow, by incorporating green manures into its surface, he transformed ordinary, even inferior, soils into extremely productive, high-yield croplands.Time magazine called this concept “one of the most revolutionary ideas in agriculture history.” The volume is being made available again not only because farmers, ranchers, gardeners, and agriculturists demanded it, but also because it details the kind of “revolution” which will aid those searching for the fruits of the earth in the emerging nations.

Download or read book Fortune s Folly written by Deva Fagan and published by Henry Holt and Company (BYR). This book was released on 2009-04-14 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since her mother died and her father lost his shoemaking skills, Fortunata has survived by telling fake fortunes. But when she's tricked into telling a grand fortune for a prince, she is faced with the impossible task of fulfilling her wild prophecy—or her father will be put to death. Now Fortunata has to help Prince Leonato secure a magic sword, vanquish a wicked witch, discover a long-lost golden shoe, and rescue the princess who fits it. If only she hadn't fallen in love with the prince herself !

Download or read book The Age of Illusions written by Andrew Bacevich and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thought-provoking and penetrating account of the post-Cold war follies and delusions that culminated in the age of Donald Trump from the bestselling author of The Limits of Power. When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Washington establishment felt it had prevailed in a world-historical struggle. Our side had won, a verdict that was both decisive and irreversible. For the world’s “indispensable nation,” its “sole superpower,” the future looked very bright. History, having brought the United States to the very summit of power and prestige, had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism as universally applicable. In the decades to come, Americans would put that claim to the test. They would embrace the promise of globalization as a source of unprecedented wealth while embarking on wide-ranging military campaigns to suppress disorder and enforce American values abroad, confident in the ability of U.S. forces to defeat any foe. Meanwhile, they placed all their bets on the White House to deliver on the promise of their Cold War triumph: unequaled prosperity, lasting peace, and absolute freedom. In The Age of Illusions, bestselling author Andrew Bacevich takes us from that moment of seemingly ultimate victory to the age of Trump, telling an epic tale of folly and delusion. Writing with his usual eloquence and vast knowledge, he explains how, within a quarter of a century, the United States ended up with gaping inequality, permanent war, moral confusion, and an increasingly angry and alienated population, as well, of course, as the strangest president in American history.

Download or read book Polk s Folly written by William R. Polk and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2001-07-17 with total page 610 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polk's Folly is William Polk's captivating investigation of his impressive family tree and of the broader American tale it narrates. Growing up in Texas in the late 1930s, listening to his grandmother's memories of her childhood amidst the Civil War, Polk became fascinated by tales of his family's engagement in monumental moments of our nation's history. Beginning when Robert Pollok fled Ireland in the 1680s, Polk's saga includes an Indian trader, an early drafter of the Declaration of Independence, one of our greatest presidents, heroes and rascals on both sides of the Civil War, Indian fighters, a World War I diplomat, and Polk's own brother, a journalist who reported on the Nuremberg Trials. Full of stunning detail and based on primary historical documents, Polk's Folly is a grand American chronicle that allows history to include the lives that made it happen.

Download or read book Nuclear Folly A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis written by Serhii Plokhy and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The definitive history.…With his masterly book, Mr. Plokhy has sounded a warning bell." — The Economist A harrowing account of the Cuban missile crisis and how the US and USSR came to the brink of nuclear apocalypse. Nearly thirty years after the end of the Cold War, today’s world leaders are abandoning disarmament treaties, building up their nuclear arsenals, and exchanging threats of nuclear strikes. To survive this new atomic age, we must relearn the lessons of the most dangerous moment of the Cold War: the Cuban missile crisis. Serhii Plokhy’s Nuclear Folly offers an international perspective on the crisis, tracing the tortuous decision-making that produced and then resolved it, which involved John Kennedy and his advisers, Nikita Khrushchev and Fidel Castro, and their commanders on the ground. In breathtaking detail, Plokhy vividly recounts the young JFK being played by the canny Khrushchev; the hotheaded Castro willing to defy the USSR and threatening to align himself with China; the Soviet troops on the ground clearing jungle foliage in the tropical heat, and desperately trying to conceal nuclear installations on Cuba, which were nonetheless easily spotted by U-2 spy planes; and the hair-raising near misses at sea that nearly caused a Soviet nuclear-armed submarine to fire its weapons. More often than not, the Americans and Soviets misread each other, operated under false information, and came perilously close to nuclear catastrophe. Despite these errors, nuclear war was ultimately avoided for one central reason: fear, and the realization that any escalation on either the Soviets’ or the Americans’ part would lead to mutual destruction. Drawing on a range of Soviet archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, as well as White House tapes, Plokhy masterfully illustrates the drama and anxiety of those tense days, and provides a way for us to grapple with the problems posed in our present day.

Download or read book Banvard s Folly written by Paul Collins and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-03-10 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Hearteningly strange . . . Collins exhumes little-known figures [and] recounts their perversely inspiring battles against the more logical ways of the world.” —The Onion Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck—or perhaps some combination of them all—leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as “The Three Mile Painting”) made him the richest and most famous artist of his day . . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed “William Shakespeare” to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard—until he pushed his luck too far. Collins’ love for what he calls the “forgotten ephemera of genius” give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard’s Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions—acts of excavation and reclamation—to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.

Download or read book August Folly written by Angela Thirkell and published by Virago. This book was released on 2014-05-01 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Angela Thirkell is perhaps the most Pym-like of any twentieth-century author, after Pym herself - Alexander McCall It's August in the Barsetshire village of Worsted, and Richard Tebben, just down from Oxford, is contemplating the gloomy prospect of a long summer in the parental home. But the numerous and impossibly glamorous Dean family - exquisite Rachel, her capable husband and six of their nine brilliant children - have come for the holidays, and their hostess Mrs Palmer plans to rope everyone into performing in her disastrous annual play. Surrounded by the irrepressible Deans, Richard and his sister Margaret cannot help but have their minds broadened, spirits raised and hearts smitten.

Download or read book To Save Everything Click Here written by Evgeny Morozov and published by . This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of The Net Delusion shows how the radical transparency we've become accustomed to online may threaten the spirit of real-life democracy