Professor Porsche's Wars

Author: Karl E. Ludvigsen
Publisher: Wharncliffe
ISBN: 9781783030194
Category : Military engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Regarded as one of the great automotive engineers of the twentieth century, Ferdinand Porsche is well remembered today for his remarkable automotive designs including the Volkswagen Beetle and Auto Union Grand Prix cars. Yet there is another side to his extraordinary career, for he was an equally inventive designer of military vehicles and machinery. In this field too he excelled. Indeed the sheer versatility of his contribution is astonishing. Karl Ludvigsen's study is the definitive guide. He tells the complete story, focusing on Porsche's relations with the German armed forces and on the stream of advanced designs he was responsible for. Included are Austro Daimler's pioneering aero engines, the Kübelwagen, Schwimmwagen, Type 100 Leopard tank, Ferdinand or Elefant tank destroyer and the astounding Type 205 Maus tank. He also describes Porsche's creative work on aero engines, tank engines and even a turbojet for the V-1 flying bomb. Karl Ludvigsen's account confirms the preeminence of Ferdinand Porsche as a brilliant and prolific engineer, one of the most remarkable of his generation.

Porsche

Author: Dennis Adler
Publisher: Motorbooks International
ISBN: 0760351902
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Book Description
Porsche: The Classic Era showcases the history of Porsche's iconic air-cooled sports cars and features rare historic images.

Porsche - Origin of the Species

Author: Karl E. Ludvigsen
Publisher: Bentleypublishers.com
ISBN: 9780837613314
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Within Jerry Seinfeld's renowned Porsche collection resides an unassuming yet extraordinary piece of Porsche history: Porsche Gmünd coupe 356/2-040. Captured exclusively for this book in a series of evocative portraits by acclaimed automotive photographer Michael Furman, 040s unsullied originality conveys with startling immediacy the combination of artistry, innovation and determination that went into its improbable creation. Porsche-Origin of the Species will appeal to all car enthusiasts who are eager to know what events really ignited the spark from which all other Porsches evolved

Knights and Peasants

Author: Nicholas Wright
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer Ltd
ISBN: 9780851158068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
Exciting and provocative... Overall, this courageous, well-written book provides us with a ground-breaking survey. It brings out a story of the Hundred Years War that has long needed to be told, and will deservedly form an essential addition to reading on the subject. HISTORY TODAY This alternative account of peasant life during crisis is a welcome addition to the historiography of late-medieval France... a useful corrective to most standard interpretations of warfare and peasantry. SPECULUM This study of the soldier-peasant relationship in the context of the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) aims to bring out the realities of the situation. It seeks an understanding of different attitudes: how aristocratic soldiers reconciled the ideals of chivalry with exploitation of non-combatants, and how French peasants reacted to the soldiery, drawing on the late-medieval literature of chivalry and political commentary in England and (especially) in France. Employing additional documentary material, including the largely unpublished records of the French royal chancery, the book also describes the ways in which individual peasants and village communities were exploited by soldiers, and how, in order to survive, they adjusted to and reacted against their treatment.

The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road

Author: G. H. Bennett
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861899483
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
In 2006 a long-forgotten canister of film was discovered in a church in Devon, a county located in the southwestern corner of the United Kingdom. No one knew how it had gotten there, but its contents were tantalizing—the grainy black and white footage showed members of the German SS and police building a road in Ukraine and Crimea in 1943. The BBC caused a sensation when it aired the footage, but the film gave few clues to the protagonists or their task. World War II historian G. H. Bennett pieces together the story of the film and its principal characters in The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road. In his search for answers, Bennett unearthed an overlooked chapter of the Holocaust: a wartime German road-building project led by Walter Gieseke, the Nazi policeman who ended up running the SS task force, that served the dual purpose of exterminating Jewish and other lives while laying the infrastructure for a utopian Nazi haven in the Ukraine. Bennett tells the story of the road and its builders through the experiences of Arnold Daghani, a Romanian artist who was one of the few Jewish laborers to survive the project. Daghani describes the brutal treatment he endured, as well as the beating, torture, and murder of his fellow laborers by the Nazis, and his postwar efforts to bring the perpetrators to justice. Recovering an important but lost episode in the history of World War II and the Holocaust, The Nazi, the Painter and the Forgotten Story of the SS Road is a moving and at times horrifying chronicle of suffering, deprivation, and survival.

The People’s Car

Author: Bernhard Rieger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674075757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

Book Description
At the Berlin Auto Show in 1938, Adolf Hitler presented the prototype for a small, oddly shaped, inexpensive family car that all good Aryans could enjoy. Decades later, that automobile—the Volkswagen Beetle—was one of the most beloved in the world. Bernhard Rieger examines culture and technology, politics and economics, and industrial design and advertising genius to reveal how a car commissioned by Hitler and designed by Ferdinand Porsche became an exceptional global commodity on a par with Coca-Cola. Beyond its quality and low cost, the Beetle’s success hinged on its uncanny ability to capture the imaginations of people across nations and cultures. In West Germany, it came to stand for the postwar “economic miracle” and helped propel Europe into the age of mass motorization. In the United States, it was embraced in the suburbs, and then prized by the hippie counterculture as an antidote to suburban conformity. As its popularity waned in the First World, the Beetle crawled across Mexico and Latin America, where it symbolized a sturdy toughness necessary to thrive amid economic instability. Drawing from a wealth of sources in multiple languages, The People’s Car presents an international cast of characters—executives and engineers, journalists and advertisers, assembly line workers and car collectors, and everyday drivers—who made the Beetle into a global icon. The Beetle’s improbable story as a failed prestige project of the Third Reich which became a world-renowned brand illuminates the multiple origins, creative adaptations, and persisting inequalities that characterized twentieth-century globalization.

Burt Rutan's Race to Space

Author: Dan Linehan
Publisher: Zenith Press
ISBN: 1610602609
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 160

Book Description
Years ago, Burt Rutan told a reporter for Popular Mechanics, “If we make a courageous decision like the goal and program we kicked off for Apollo in 1961, we will see our children or grandchildren in outposts on other planets.” Legendary science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clark would later recall Rutan’s quote in a piece he wrote about SpaceShipOne and comment, “Fortunately, we need not rely solely on governments for expanding humanity’s presence beyond the Earth.” Burt Rutan’s Race to Space showcases Rutan’s herculean efforts to do just that. Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum displays his most celebrated achievements, including SpaceShipOne, which won the coveted $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight; Voyager, which hangs with SpaceShipOne in the Milestones of Flight gallery; the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer; and the VariEze. His many aerospace innovations preceding his most recently conceived designs, SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo, chronicle a progressive, step-by-step attempt to break barriers with engineering know-how and a wondrous imagination, all the while remaining on the forefront of the burgeoning private spaceflight industry. Rutan’s X Prize triumph and subsequent spacecraft designs are not a beginning, nor an end, but are steps in Burt Rutan’s continuing adventure to expand humanity’s presence beyond the Earth and into space.

Battle for the Beetle

Author: Karl E. Ludvigsen
Publisher: Bentley Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Book Description
Ludvigsen traces the history of the Volkswagon Beetle, from its inception as a people's car for Hitler's Germany to its status as a beloved American icon, to the arrival of the New Beetle in 1998. He focuses on the car's creation, the industry-wide power struggle following the German defeat in World

Porsche

Author: Lucinda Lewis
Publisher: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates
ISBN: 9780883631225
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Now, in a book whose design is as refined and as smart as the car itself, the story of the Porsche unfolds from its beginning, as a creation of Dr. Ferdinand Porsch and his son in 1948, through forty-two models to today's magnificent examples. Porsche: The Fine Art of the Sports Car features more than 225 color and 120 black-and-white photographs. Historical photographs document the car's past in all its glory, and stunning color photographs by top automotive photographer Lucinda Lewis captures the car's elegance and verve.An ideal book for car lovers, racing enthusiasts, and anyone who admires the very best in modern design and engineering.

The Wolf and the Watchman

Author: Scott C Johnson
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN: 0393239802
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
What happens when a father asks his son to lie for the greater good? Growing up, Scott C. Johnson always suspected that his father was different. Only as a teenager did he discover the truth: his father was a spy, one of the CIA’s most trusted officers. At first the secret was thrilling. But over time Scott began to have doubts. How could a man so rigorously trained to deceive and manipulate simply turn off those skills at home? His father had been living a double life for so long that his lies were hard to separate from the truth. When Scott embarked on a career as a foreign correspondent, he found himself returning to many of the troubled countries of his youth. In the dusty streets of Pakistan and Afghanistan, amid the cold urbanity of Yugoslavia, and down the mysterious alleys of Mexico City, he came face to face with his father’s murky past—and his own complicity in it. Scott learned that his chosen profession was not so different from his father’s: they both worked to gain people’s trust and to uncover their secrets. The only difference was what they did with that information. In the aftermath of 9/11, father and son found themselves on assignment in Afghanistan and the Middle East, one as a CIA contractor, the other as a reporter for Newsweek. Suddenly, an unsettled Scott was forced to keep his father’s secret all over again. As their professional lives collided, Scott and his father inched toward a personal reckoning, struggling to overcome a lifetime of suspicion and deception. The Wolf and the Watchman is a provocative, meditative account of truth and duplicity, of manipulation and loyalty. It is also a moving, intensely personal portrait of a bond between father and son that endured in the shadow of one of the world’s most secretive and unforgiving institutions.