Uncommon Carriers

Uncommon Carriers PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780865477391
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
McPhee, in prose distinguished by its warm humor, keen insight, and rich sense of human character, looks at the people who drive trucks, captain ships, pilot towboats, drive coal trains, and carry lobsters through the air: people who work in freight transportation.

Uncommon Warriors

Uncommon Warriors PDF Author: Ken W. Sayers
Publisher: US Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 9781591147602
Category : Warships
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
200 Years of the Most Unusual American Naval Vessels.

Uncommon Valor

Uncommon Valor PDF Author: Dwight Jon Zimmerman
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429988916
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
Uncommon Valor from Dwight Jon Zimmerman and John D. Gresham presents a fascinating look at six of our bravest soldiers and the highest military decoration awarded in this country. Since the Vietnam War ended in 1973, the Medal of Honor, our nation's highest award for valor, has been presented to only eight men for their actions "above and beyond the call of duty." Six of the eight were young men who had fought in the current war in Iraq, Afghanistan, or both. All of these medals were awarded posthumously, as all had made the choice to give their lives so that their comrades might live. Uncommon Valor answers the searing question of who these six young soldiers were, and dramatically details how they found themselves in life-or-death situations, and why they responded as they did. For the first time, this book also provides a comprehensive history of the Medal of Honor itself—one marred by controversies, scandals, and theft. Using an extraordinary range of sources, including interviews with family members and friends, teammates and superiors in the military, personal letters, blogs posted within hours of events, personal and official videos and newly declassified documents, Uncommon Valor is a compelling and important work that recounts incredible acts of heroism and lays bare the ultimate sacrifice of our bravest soldiers.

The Founding Fish

The Founding Fish PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706344
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Book Description
John McPhee's twenty-sixth book is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. Each spring, American shad-Alosa sapidissima-leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run heroic distances upriver to spawn. McPhee--a shad fisherman himself--recounts the shad's cameo role in the lives of George Washington and Henry David Thoreau. He fishes with and visits the laboratories of famous ichthyologists; he takes instruction in the making of shad darts from a master of the art; and he cooks shad in a variety of ways, delectably explained at the end of the book. Mostly, though, he goes fishing for shad in various North American rivers, and he "fishes the same way he writes books, avidly and intensely. He wants to know everything about the fish he's after--its history, its habits, its place in the cosmos" (Bill Pride, The Denver Post). His adventures in pursuit of shad occasion the kind of writing--expert and ardent--at which he has no equal.

Encounters with the Archdruid

Encounters with the Archdruid PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708630
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

Irons in the Fire

Irons in the Fire PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708479
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
In this collection John McPhee once agains proves himself as a master observer of all arenas of life as well a powerful and important writer.

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374137811
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the airplane and rigid airship - huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. Its early and secrect experimenta; development took twelve years' time and one and a half million dollars. McPhee chronicles the perhaps unfathomable perseverance of the aircraft's successive progenitors and makes it seem as momentous as the first trip to the moon.

Assembling California

Assembling California PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374706026
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
At various times in a span of fifteen years, John McPhee made geological field surveys in the company of Eldridge Moores, a tectonicist at the University of California at Davis. The result of these trips is Assembling California, a cross-section in human and geologic time, from Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada through the golden foothills of the Mother Lode and across the Great Central Valley to the wine country of the Coast Ranges, the rock of San Francisco, and the San Andreas family of faults. The two disparate time scales occasionally intersect—in the gold disruptions of the nineteenth century no less than in the earthquakes of the twentieth—and always with relevance to a newly understood geologic history in which half a dozen large and separate pieces of country are seen to have drifted in from far and near to coalesce as California. McPhee and Moores also journeyed to remote mountains of Arizona and to Cyprus and northern Greece, where rock of the deep-ocean floor has been transported into continental settings, as it has in California. Global in scope and a delight to read, Assembling California is a sweeping narrative of maps in motion, of evolving and dissolving lands.

Looking for a Ship

Looking for a Ship PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429958111
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
This is an extraordinary tale of life on the high seas aboard one of the last American merchant ships, the S.S. Stella Lykes, on a forty-two-day journey from Charleston down the Pacific coast of South America. As the crew of the Stella Lykes makes their ocean voyage, they tell stories of other runs and other ships, tales of disaster, stupidity, greed, generosity, and courage.

Levels of the Game

Levels of the Game PDF Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708657
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Book Description
Levels of the Game is John McPhee's astonishing account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968. It begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games. "This may be the high point of American sports journalism"- Robert Lipsyte, The New York Times
Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Rits Blog by Crimson Themes.