Download or read book Last Flag Flying written by Darryl Ponicsán and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2017-09-28 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture, directed by five-time Oscar-nominee Richard Linklater and starring Oscar nominees Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne. When middle-aged veteran Meadows learns that the authorities have told him a lie about the circumstances of the death of his son, a Marine killed in Iraq, he reunites with aging companions Billy Bad-Ass Buddusky and Mule Mulhall to perform a sacred task: the proper burial of his boy. So begins the journey up the Eastern seaboard, both a solemn mission and a protest against injustice, a celebration of life that is at once irreverent, funny, profane and deeply moving. Darryl Ponicsán's debut novel The Last Detail was named one of the best of the year and widely acclaimed, catapulting him to fame when it was first published and made into an award-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson. Last Flag Flying, set thirty-four years after the events of The Last Detail, brings together the same beloved characters for a striking meditation on the passage of time and the nature of truth. The Last Detail, which introduced the characters of Last Flag Flying, is also available in ebook now.
Download or read book Last Flag Down written by John Baldwin and published by Crown. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the Confederacy felt itself slipping beneath the Union juggernaut in late 1864, the South launched a desperate counteroffensive to shatter the U.S. economy and force a standoff. Its secret weapon? A state-of-the-art raiding ship whose mission was to prowl the world’s oceans and sink the U.S. merchant fleet. The raider’s name was Shenandoah, and her executive officer was Conway Whittle, a twenty-four-year-old warrior who might have stepped from the pages of Arthurian legend. Whittle would share command with a dark and brooding veteran of the seas, Capt. James Waddell, and together with a crew of strays, misfits, and strangers, they would spend nearly a year sailing two-thirds of the way around the globe, destroying dozens of Union ships and taking more than a thousand prisoners, all while continually dodging the enemy.Then, in August of 1865, a British ship revealed the shocking truth to the men of Shenandoah: The war had been over for months, and they were now being hunted as pirates. What ensued was an incredible 15,000-mile journey to the one place the crew hoped to find sanctuary, only to discover that their fate would depend on how they answered a single question. Wondrously evocative and filled with drama and poignancy, Last Flag Down is a riveting story of courage, nobility, and rare comradeship forged in the quest to achieve the impossible.
Download or read book Our Flag written by Carl Memling and published by Golden Books. This book was released on 2011-05-10 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The youngest readers will enjoy this concise but informative history of the American flag with beautiful and exciting illlustrations of colonial life, Betsy Ross, George Washington, and Fort McHenry. Included are illustrated instructions on flag etiquette, as well as the Pledge of Allegiance.
Download or read book The Last Flag written by Barbara Butterfield and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2021-01-10 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honor Guard member: GSgt. Zach Szarbino hands a folded United States flag to a grieving widow...for the last time. Reaching the breaking point, he and best friend, MSgt. Alex Bach risk everything to make sure no more folded flags have to be handed to grieving family members. Together, the two soldiers concoct an extraordinary plan to eliminate the deranged leader of a violent regime. Will these brave, though slightly off-beat soldiers accomplish their goal, or be stopped somewhere along the way? The Bible states that with God all things are possible and Zach and Alex are about to find out!
Download or read book Flags of Our Fathers written by James Bradley and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2006-08-29 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island's highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag. Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever. To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man. But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo—three were killed during the battle—were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley's father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: “The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn't come back. ” Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.
Download or read book The Last Detail written by Darryl Ponicsán and published by Skyhorse. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unlike other branches of the armed services, the Navy draws it police force from the ranks, as temporary duty called Shore Patrol. In this funny, bawdy, moving novel set during the height of the Vietnam War, two career sailors in transit in Norfolk, Virginia—Billy "Bad-Ass" Buddusky and Mule Mulhall—are assigned to escort eighteen-year-old Larry Meadows from Norfolk to the brig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where he is to serve an eight-year sentence for petty theft. It's good duty, until the two old salts realize the injustice of the sentence and are oddly affected by the naive innocence of their young prisoner. In the five days allotted for the detail, they decide to show Meadows something of the life he doesn't yet know, to help him survive the long ordeal ahead and to purge their own shame. What follows is an unlikely road trip by bus and train up the Eastern seaboard and an indelible journey of initiation and discovery, filled with beer-soaked wisdom, big city lights, revelry, brawls, debauchery, love, and surprising moments of tenderness.
Download or read book Last Flag Flying written by Darryl Ponicsán and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major movie starring Steve Carell, Bryan Cranston, and Laurence Fishburne, directed by Richard Linklater! Darryl Ponicsan's debut novel The Last Detail was named one of the best of the year and widely acclaimed, catapulting him to fame when it was first published. The story of two career sailors assigned to escort a young seaman from Norfolk to the naval prison in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—and of the mayhem that ensues—was made into an award-winning movie starring Jack Nicholson. Last Flag Flying, set thirty-four years after the events of The Last Detail, brings together the same beloved characters—Billy Bad-Ass Buddusky, Mule Mulhall, and Meadows—to reprise the same journey but under very different circumstances. Now middle-aged, Meadows seeks out his former captors in their civilian lives to help him bury his son, a Marine killed in Iraq, in Arlington National Cemetery. When he learns that the authorities have told him a lie about the circumstances of his son's death, he decides, with the help of the two others, to transport him home to Portsmouth. And so begins the journey, centered around a solemn mission but, as in the first book, a protest against injustice and celebration of life too, at once irreverent, funny, profane, and deeply moving. Last Flag Flying is now a major movie from Amazon Studios, directed by Richard Linklater and starring Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne.
Download or read book Wrapped in the Flag written by Claire Conner and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A narrative history of the John Birch Society by a daughter of one of the infamous ultraconservative organization’s founding fathers. Named a best nonfiction book of 2013 by Kirkus Reviews and the Tampa Bay Times Long before the rise of the Tea Party movement and the prominence of today’s religious Right, the John Birch Society, first established in 1958, championed many of the same radical causes touted by ultraconservatives today, including campaigns against abortion rights, gay rights, gun control, labor unions, environmental protections, immigrant rights, social and welfare programs, the United Nations, and even water fluoridation. Worshipping its anti-Communist hero Joe McCarthy, the Birch Society is perhaps most notorious for its red-baiting and for accusing top politicians, including President Dwight Eisenhower, of being Communist sympathizers. It also labeled John F. Kennedy a traitor and actively worked to unseat him. The Birch Society boasted a number of notable members, including Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch, who are using their father’s billions to bankroll fundamentalist and right-wing movements today. The daughter of one of the society’s first members and a national spokesman about the society, Claire Conner grew up surrounded by dedicated Birchers and was expected to abide by and espouse Birch ideals. When her parents forced her to join the society at age thirteen, she became its youngest member of the society. From an even younger age though, Conner was pressed into service for the cause her father and mother gave their lives to: the nurturing and growth of the JBS. She was expected to bring home her textbooks for close examination (her mother found traces of Communist influence even in the Catholic school curriculum), to write letters against “socialized medicine” after school, to attend her father’s fiery speeches against the United Nations, or babysit her siblings while her parents held meetings in the living room to recruit members to fight the war on Christmas or (potentially poisonous) water fluoridation. Conner was “on deck” to lend a hand when JBS notables visited, including founder Robert Welch, notorious Holocaust denier Revilo Oliver, and white supremacist Thomas Stockheimer. Even when she was old enough to quit in disgust over the actions of those men, Conner found herself sucked into campaigns against abortion rights and for ultraconservative presidential candidates like John Schmitz. It took momentous changes in her own life for Conner to finally free herself of the legacy of the John Birch Society in which she was raised. In Wrapped in the Flag, Claire Conner offers an intimate account of the society —based on JBS records and documents, on her parents’ files and personal writing, on historical archives and contemporary accounts, and on firsthand knowledge—giving us an inside look at one of the most radical right-wing movements in US history and its lasting effects on our political discourse today.
Download or read book The Flag Book written by Lonely Planet Kids and published by Lonely Planet. This book was released on 2019-09-01 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did you know that flags are actually pictures that send a message to everyone who sees them? In The Flag Book you'll uncover the hidden meanings of flags- from country and state colours to flags used in sports, on ships and aeroplanes, and by the most dastardly of Caribbean pirates.
Download or read book The Flag the Cross and the Station Wagon written by Bill McKibben and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022 Bill McKibben—award-winning author, activist, educator—is fiercely curious. “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.” Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing—knowing—that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang “Kumbaya” at church. And with the remarkable rise of suburbia, he assumed that all Americans would share in the wealth. But fifty years later, he finds himself in an increasingly doubtful nation strained by bleak racial and economic inequality, on a planet whose future is in peril. And he is curious: What the hell happened? In this revelatory cri de coeur, McKibben digs deep into our history (and his own well-meaning but not all-seeing past) and into the latest scholarship on race and inequality in America, on the rise of the religious right, and on our environmental crisis to explain how we got to this point. He finds that he is not without hope. And he wonders if any of that trinity of his youth—The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon—could, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.
Download or read book Lilac and Flag written by John Berger and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-23 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the mythic city of Troy, amidst the shanty-towns, factories, opulent hotels, fading heritages and steadfast dreams, the children and grandchildren of rural peasants pursue meagre livings as best they can. And two young lovers embark upon a passionate journey of love and survival.
Download or read book Bloody Flag of Anarchy written by Brian C. Neumann and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2022-04-13 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Generations of scholars have debated why the Union collapsed and descended into civil war in the spring of 1861. Turning this question on its head, Brian C. Neumann’s Bloody Flag of Anarchy asks how the fragile Union held together for so long. This fascinating study grapples with this dilemma by reexamining the nullification crisis, one of the greatest political debates of the antebellum era, when the country came perilously close to armed conflict in the winter of 1832–33 after South Carolina declared two tariffs null and void. Enraged by rising taxes and the specter of emancipation, 25,000 South Carolinians volunteered to defend the state against the perceived tyranny of the federal government. Although these radical Nullifiers claimed to speak for all Carolinians, the impasse left the Palmetto State bitterly divided. Forty percent of the state’s voters opposed nullification, and roughly 9,000 men volunteered to fight against their fellow South Carolinians to hold the Union together. Bloody Flag of Anarchy examines the hopes, fears, and ideals of these Union men, who viewed the nation as the last hope of liberty in a world dominated by despotism—a bold yet fragile testament to humanity’s capacity for self-government. They believed that the Union should preserve both liberty and slavery, ensuring peace, property, and prosperity for all white men. Nullification, they feared, would provoke social and political chaos, shattering the Union, destroying the social order, and inciting an apocalyptic racial war. By reframing the nullification crisis, Neumann provides fresh insight into the internal divisions within South Carolina, illuminating a facet of the conflict that has long gone underappreciated. He reveals what the Union meant to Americans in the Jacksonian era and explores the ways both factions deployed conceptions of manhood to mobilize supporters. Nullifiers attacked their opponents as timid “submission men” too cowardly to defend their freedom. Many Unionists pushed back by insisting that “true men” respected the law and shielded their families from the horrors of disunion. Viewing the nullification crisis against the backdrop of global events, they feared that America might fail when the world, witnessing turmoil across Europe and the Caribbean, needed its example the most. By closely examining how the nation avoided a ruinous civil war in the early 1830s, Bloody Flag of Anarchy sheds new light on why America failed three decades later to avoid a similar fate.
Download or read book Bear Flag Rising written by Dale L. Walker and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2000-05-01 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dale L. Walker, historian and author of Legends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West, takes on the conquest of California in this vivid portrait of America's manifest destiny. Bear Flag Rising traces the history of California from the Indians who inhabited the land before the first Europeans saw it through the warfare that would finally leave the province in American hands. The lives of the Californios in tranquil days before the advent of American trappers and the steady decline of the province under Mexico's neglectful rule are brought to life in this epic chronicle. Battles and skirmishes, such as the bitter fight on the San Gabriel River during the march to recapture Los Angeles, are meticulously re-created in all their vicious glory. Above all, Bear Flag Rising is rich with the personalities of the conquest--from John Charles Fremont, the ambitious, enigmatic explorer, to Commodore Robert Field Stockton, a wealthy, imperious, and ruthless naval officer, and Stephen Watts Kearny, who made a 2,000-mile overland march from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, annexing New Mexico on the way, and arrived in California to face Mexican lancers in battle. Bear Flag Rising reveals, through exacting research and masterful prose, the full story of how Mexico lost California and how this Pacific paradise went on to become "the greatest jewel in the crown of the American Empire." At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book First Raise a Flag written by Peter Martell and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When South Sudan's war began, the Beatles were playing their first hits and reaching the moon was an astronaut's dream. Half a century later, with millions massacred in Africa's longest war, the continent's biggest country split in two. It was an extraordinary, unprecedented experiment. Many have fought, but South Sudan did the impossible, and won. This is the story of an epic fight for freedom. It is also the story of a nightmare. First Raise a Flag details one of the most dramatic failures in the history of international state-building. three years after independence, South Sudan was lowest ranked in the list of failed states. War returned, worse than ever. Peter Martell has spent over a decade reporting from palaces and battlefields, meeting those who made a country like no other: warlords and spies, missionaries and mercenaries, guerrillas and gunrunners, freedom fighters and war crime fugitives, Hollywood stars and ex-slaves. Under his seasoned foreign correspondent's gaze, he weaves with passion and colour the lively history of the world's newest country. First Raise a Flag is a moving reflection on the meaning of nationalism, the power of hope and the endurance of the human spirit.
Download or read book Sons of the Flag written by Ryan Parrott and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-19 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are plenty of books and movies about what different soldiers experienced in war - but few grind out the details of why they do it. Sons of the Flag brings together the veterans from each of the American wars from WWII to the present and the veteran firefighters of 9/11 who served during the greatest attack on American soil. Each contributor tells precisely why they do what they do - putting country and brotherhood before their own safety. Weaving their chapters together, author Ryan "Birdman" Parrott, an American veteran, shares the journey that led from being a self-described screw-up to becoming the visionary and leader of Sons of the Flag, an organization dedicated to burn survivors. The contributors associate key moments in their lives that impacted them forever in putting their brothers to the right and left before themselves. Parrott asks readers to imagine a country where all citizens were as dedicated as these men in serving their fellow Americans.
Download or read book The Confederate Battle Flag written by John M. COSKI and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, the Confederate flag has become as much a news item as a Civil War relic. Intense public debates have erupted over Confederate flags flying atop state capitols, being incorporated into state flags, waving from dormitory windows, or adorning the T-shirts and jeans of public school children. To some, this piece of cloth is a symbol of white supremacy and enduring racial injustice; to others, it represents a rich Southern heritage and an essential link to a glorious past. Polarizing Americans, these flag wars reveal the profound--and still unhealed--schisms that have plagued the country since the Civil War. The Confederate Battle Flag is the first comprehensive history of this contested symbol. Transcending conventional partisanship, John Coski reveals the flag's origins as one of many banners unfurled on the battlefields of the Civil War. He shows how it emerged as the preeminent representation of the Confederacy and was transformed into a cultural icon from Reconstruction on, becoming an aggressively racist symbol only after World War II and during the Civil Rights movement. We gain unique insight into the fine line between the flag's use as a historical emblem and as an invocation of the Confederate nation and all it stood for. Pursuing the flag's conflicting meanings, Coski suggests how this provocative artifact, which has been viewed with pride, fear, anger, nostalgia, and disgust, might ultimately provide Americans with the common ground of a shared and complex history.
Download or read book History of the National Flag of the United States of America written by Schuyler Hamilton and published by Philadelphia, Lippincott, Grambo, and Company. This book was released on 1853 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
