This book presents a warrior's life, on and off the battlefield. From the Samurai of Japan to US rifleman, explore the dramatic experiences of soldiers who've fought battles and paid the price of warfare. Experience life on the frontline through personal accounts of the training, living conditions and engagements from 2,500 years of military history. Learn about fighting techniques and tactics from each era, and see the armour, uniforms, kit and weapons used in the field. Virtual tours take you inside the fortresses, ships, tanks and aircraft in which soldiers have battled, from a Viking longship to the cockpit of a B17 bomber. This book contains foreword from Colonel Tim Collins (OBE), who made headlines with his inspirational 'Eve-of-Battle' speech during the Iraqi conflict. This is an essential visual record of the fighting man.

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Gerald Majer - The Velvet Lounge, On Late Chicago Jazz (2005).jpg

Troubled urban neighborhoods and jazz-club havens were the backdrop of Gerald Majer's life growing up in sixties and seventies Chicago. The Velvet Lounge, an original hybrid of memoir, biography, and musical description, reflects this history and pursues a sustained meditation on jazz along with a probing exploration of race and class and how they defined the material and psychic divides of a city. With the instrument of a supple, lyrical prose style, Majer elaborates the book's themes through literary and intellectual forays as carefully constructed and as passionately articulated as a jazz master's solo. Throughout the work, issues of identity and culture, art and politics achieve a rare immediacy, as does the music itself.

In portraits of Jimmy Smith, Gene Ammons, Sonny Stitt, Sun Ra, and others, Gerald Majer conveys the drama and artistry of their music as well as the personal hardships many of them endured. Vivid descriptions and telling historical anecdotes explore the music's richness through a variety of political, social, and philosophical contexts. The Velvet Lounge, named after the famous Chicago club, is also one of the few works to consider the music of such avant-garde jazz musicians as Fred Anderson, Andrew Hill, and Roscoe Mitchell. In doing so, Majer builds a bridge from the traditionalist view of jazz to the world of contemporary innovators, casts a new light on the music and its makers, and traces connections between jazz art and postmodernist thought.

Present throughout Majer's spirited encounters with the worlds of jazz is Majer himself. We hear and appreciate the music through his individual sensibilities and experiences. Majer recounts growing up in racially divided Chicago -- his trips to the famed Maxwell Street market, his wanderings among its legendary jazz clubs, his riding the El, and his working in a jukebox factory. We witness his awakening to the music at a crossroads of the intimately personal and the intellectually provocative.

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6 mar 13 5:36

George F. Hofmann - Through Mobility We Conquer, T he Mechanization of U.S. Cavalry (2006).jpg

The U.S. Cavalry, which began in the nineteenth century as little more than a mounted reconnaissance and harrying force, underwent intense growing pains with the rapid technological developments of the twentieth century. From its tentative beginnings during World War I, the eventual conversion of the traditional horse cavalry to a mechanized branch is arguably one of the greatest military transformations in history.

Through Mobility We Conquer recounts the evolution and development of the U.S. Army’s modern mechanized cavalry and the doctrine necessary to use it effectively, and explores the debates over how best to use cavalry. Having reviewed thousands of official records and manuals, military journals, personal papers, memoirs, and oral histories—many of which were only recently declassified—George F. Hofmann now presents a detailed study of the doctrine, equipment, structure, organization, tactics, and strategy of U.S. mechanized cavalry during the first half of the twentieth century.

Illustrated with dozens of photographs, maps, and charts, Through Mobility We Conquer examines how technology revolutionized U.S. forces in the twentieth century, and demonstrates how perhaps no branch of the military underwent greater changes during this time than the cavalry.

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8,5 MB
6 mar 13 5:36

George F. Hofmann - Through Mobility We Conquer, T he Mechanization of U.S. Cavalry (2006).pdf

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6 mar 13 5:36

Karl Samson - Frommer's Washington State (2010).jpg

More than 14 million visitors a year and hordes of international visitors have made Washington the 11th most popular U.S. state for foreign tourists. This guide hits all the highlights, from the exciting restaurant and nightlife scenes in Seattle to the pristine beauty of the San Juan islands. It also offers complete coverage of Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, and Olympic National Park, which hosts more than 4 million visitors annually, making it the 3rd most popular park in the country. With candid, in-depth reviews; detailed color maps; and choices for every taste and budget, Frommers is the premier guide to the best of the Northwest!

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7,9 MB
6 mar 13 5:36

Karl Samson - Frommer's Washington State (2010).pdf

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6 mar 13 5:36

Loren C. Steffy - Drowning in Oil, BP & the Reckle ss Pursuit of Profit (2010).jpg

As night settled on April 20, 2010, a series of explosions rocked Deepwater Horizon, the immense semisubmersible drilling platform leased by British Petroleum, located 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The ensuing inferno claimed 11 lives, and it would rage uncontained for two days, until its wreckage sank to a final resting place nearly a mile beneath the waves. On the ocean floor, the unit's wellhead erupted. Over the next ten weeks, as repeated attempts to cap the geyser failed, an estimated 200 million gallons of oil—the equivalent of 20 Exxon Valdez spills—spewed into the Gulf of Mexico, eventually lapping up on beaches as far away as Florida.

Drowning in Oil, by award-winning Houston Chronicle business reporter and columnist Loren Steffy—considered by many to be the writer with the best access to the story—is an unprecedented and gripping narrative of this catastrophe and how BP's winner-take-all business culture made it all but inevitable.

Through never-before-published interviews with BP executives and employees, environmental experts, and oil industry insiders, Steffy takes us behind the scenes of 100 years of BP corporate history. Beginning with the conglomerate's early gambits in the Middle East to its recent ascent among energy titans, Steff unearths the roots of the Gulf oil spill in the unwritten bargain between oil producers and consumers, whose insatiable appetites drive the search for new supplies faster, farther, and deeper.

Beyond this, the Deepwater Horizon disaster took place after a history of cost cutting in pursuit of profits, particularly under the guidance of its two most recent ex-CEOs, John Browne and Anthony Hayward.

Exhaustively researched and documented, Drowning in Oil is the first in-depth examination of how a lack of corporate responsibility and government oversight led to the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history. It is an objective, no-punches-pulled account of the energy industry: its environmental impact and the intense competition among stakeholders in today's oil markets.

This book puts all the pieces together, offering a definitive account of BP's pursuit of outsized profits as the industrial world awakens to the grim realities of Peak Oil.

"They fumbled around the darkened room and found an instruction manual. By flashlight, they read the starting procedures. They were doing everything right. After five or six futile tries, they gave up and headed back toward the bridge. Back on the bridge, alarms were shrieking and the captain knew they were running out of time. The subsea engineer had hit the emergency disconnect for the well, and although the control panel showed the rig should be free, it wasn't. The hydraulics were dead. Fire continued to shoot from the top of the derrick. The rig had no power, and without power, it had no pumps for the firefighting equipment, no way to shut off the flow of gas from the well, and no way to disconnect the rig from the flaming umbilical that had it tethered to the wellhead." —from Drowning in Oil

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1,3 MB
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Loren C. Steffy - Drowning in Oil, BP & the Reckle ss Pursuit of Profit (2010).pdf

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6 mar 13 5:36

One Shot - Matthew Stuges - G.I. Combat Featuring The Haunted Tank 1 (2010).jpg

Tank commander Jeb Stuart gets some lessons about war and death from his ghostly guardian and namesake, Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart. This is a good, self-contained story that doesn't try to revamp these old characters or engage in any politically-correct revisionism. It introduces the lead characters and the strange situation of a World War II tank being haunted by a Civil War general and then goes straight to the action. In this story, the tank must hold a deserted town where the Germans can seemingly strike out of nowhere. In this situation, Jeb will need the help of more than one ghost to get out alive. The concise, yet moving story is a refreshing throwback to the days when continued stories were the exceptions rather than the rule at DC Comics. The threat is menacing without being outlandish and the big twist at the end really surprising without being contrived. The art is adequate, especially in its depiction of the tiny size of the Stuart tank but it is also a bit too 'clean' for a war story. There isn't enough grime, dirt, grease and blood in the background, on the military vehicles or even caked on the faces of the protagonists. -- review by Koppy McFad, comicbookbin.com
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Jeb Stuart's gotten used to his tank being haunted by the ghost of his Civil War ancestor, General J.E.B. Stuart, but when he and his crew are pinned down by German soldiers in a walled city, what will happen when he must take the helm of a tank haunted by a very different kind of dead man? -- dccomics.com

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16,1 MB
6 mar 13 5:36

One Shot - Matthew Stuges - G.I. Combat Featuring The Haunted Tank 1 (2010) [JPG x 24].rar

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Concord - Firepower Pictorials Special 1027 - Mich ael Green - M60 Tank (1992).jpg

The U.S. Army's Ml Abrams Main Baffle Tank has dominated the civilian press and the military trade journals since the first production model rolled off the assembly line in February. 1980, with untold numbers of stories about its development, fielding, and problems both real and imagined.
Unfortunately, forgotten by many is the fact that the M60 family of tanks will still make up over fifty percent of the U.S. Army's inventory of main battle tanks until the late 1990s.
With the recent thaw in cold war tensions and the announced defense cutbacks by the U.S. Army, use of the M60 tank could last Into the 21st Century both with the U.S. tank fleet and foreign armies.
The history of the M60 tank begins in 1959 when a modified version of the M48A2 Pafton was introduced with a new front hull, a diesel engine, and a 105mm gun. To highlight the improvement over the earlier vehicle, it was redesignated as the 105mm gun tank M60. The M60 series of tanks had, since the beginning of Its production run in early 1960, been considered to be only an interim vehicle intended to serve the U.S. Army until the ideal tank could be designed and built. But, 15,000 tanks later, the M60 tank is still in service around the world. Numerous development programs helped to extend the useful life of the tank and kept it viable as a combat vehicle. Fortunately, the basic design was sound and easily accommodated the many modifications added to it over the years.
The last production version of the M60 tank was the M60A3, which was first introduced into US Army service In 1978.
The external appearance of the M60A3 tank is not very different from the M60A1 tank model. Only the thermal shroud on the gun tube, the wind sensor on top of the turret bustle, and the laser safety shield on the right side rangefinder blister distinguish it as an A3 model.
Unique features of the A3 are its Ml tank type fire control system, which include a laser rangefinder. solid state electronic computer, and a tank thermal sight (TTS for short).
The (TTS) provides a large improvement over image intensification sights as tound on earlier models of the M60 tank. It employs thermal technology so that its detection range is not dependent on moon or starlight. It "sees" as well in total darkness as it does in daylight and can detect targets through smoke, fog, and dust. It can also penetrate camouflage because it senses the heat of objects hidden by natural or manmade materials.

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12,1 MB
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Concord - Firepower Pictorials Special 1027 - Mich ael Green - M60 Tank (1992).pdf

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Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Jacqueline S. Reinier - Boyhood in America, An Encyclopedia (2001).jpg

The latest entry in "The American Family" series, which includes such titles as Girlhood in America and Infancy in America, this work is a worthy contribution to the field of men's studies. Clement (history, Pennsylvania State Univ.; Growing Pains: Children in the Industrial Age) and Reinier (emerita, California State Univ.; From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775-1850) take a multidisciplinary and multicultural approach, offering more than 150 alphabetically arranged entries on the period from childhood through adolescence. Contributed by scholars, the illustrated entries typically include several pages of social history, statistics, analysis, and references.

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Priscilla Ferguson Clement, Jacqueline S. Reinier - Boyhood in America, An Encyclopedia (2001).pdf

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Andrei S. Markovits - Uncouth Nation, Why Europe D islikes America (2007).jpg

No survey can capture the breadth and depth of the anti-Americanism that has swept Europe in recent years. From ultraconservative Bavarian grandmothers to thirty-year-old socialist activists in Greece, from globalization opponents to corporate executives--Europeans are joining in an ever louder chorus of disdain for America. For the first time, anti-Americanism has become a European lingua franca. In this sweeping and provocative look at the history of European aversion to America, Andrei Markovits argues that understanding the ubiquity of anti-Americanism since September 11, 2001, requires an appreciation of such sentiments among European elites going back at least to July 4, 1776. While George W. Bush's policies have catapulted anti-Americanism into overdrive, particularly in Western Europe, Markovits argues that this loathing has long been driven not by what America does, but by what it is. Focusing on seven Western European countries big and small, he shows how antipathies toward things American embrace aspects of everyday life--such as sports, language, work, education, media, health, and law--that remain far from the purview of the Bush administration's policies. Aggravating Europeans' antipathies toward America is their alleged helplessness in the face of an Americanization that they view as inexorably befalling them. More troubling, Markovits argues, is that this anti-Americanism has cultivated a new strain of anti-Semitism. Above all, he shows that while Europeans are far apart in terms of their everyday lives and shared experiences, their not being American provides them with a powerful common identity--one that elites have already begun to harness in their quest to construct a unified Europe to rival America.

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Richard C. Webb - Tele-Visionaries, The People Beh ind the Invention of Television (2005).jpg

The engineers and scientists who participated in the invention of television never dreamed of the staggering impact that it would have on society and culture. They were simply trying to bring moving pictures into America's living rooms. Tele-Visionaries: The People Behind the Invention of Television invites us to step back in time for a fascinating firsthand account of the invention and evolution of television. From the first developments in monochrome image transmission to color broadcasting and finally to digital video, Richard Webb's book offers us a rarely seen insider's view into the key innovations that have made television the powerful medium it is today. Dr. Webb was a member of "Ray Kell's color group" at RCA, where he was one of a handful of talented engineers who played a pivotal role in the development of television.

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David G. McComb - Spare Time in Texas, Recreation and History in the Lone Star State (2008).jpg

What do Texans' pastimes and recreations say about their characters? Looking at Texas history from a new angle, David McComb starts from the premise that how people spend their leisure time may well reveal more about their true natures and interests than the work they do or their family connections. In this innovative book, McComb traces the history of various types of recreation in Texas, gathering significant insights into the characters of Texans from the pleasures they have pursued. Reflecting the frontier origins of Texas, McComb starts with the recreations that were most popular with men in a crude, still-developing society--drinking, gambling, and whoring. He goes on to show how, as Texas became more civilized, so did its diversions. He describes how Texans have connected with nature in parks and zoos; watched football and baseball in great stadiums such as the Astrodome and Cotton Bowl; discovered the pleasure of reading in public and university libraries; and enjoyed radio, TV, movies, and live theater in places such as Houston's Alley Theatre. This recreational history reveals that Texans are open-minded and generous; that they respect the land; oppose prostitution but indulge in gambling and drinking; support racial and gender rights; love zoos; champion libraries; take pride in theatrical productions; and adore sports.

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David G. McComb - Spare Time in Texas, Recreation and History in the Lone Star State (2008).pdf

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Diane Ravitch - The Death and Life of the Great Am erican School System, How Testing and Choice Are U ndermining Education (2010).jpg

USA Books - Diane Ravitch - The Death and Life of the Great Americ... How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education 2010.jpg

As an education historian and former assistant secretary of education, Ravitch has witnessed the trends in public education over the past 40 years and has herself swung from public-school advocate to market-driven accountability and choice supporter back to public-school advocate. With passion and insight, she analyzes research and draws on interviews with educators, philanthropists, and business executives to question the current direction of reform of public education. In the mid-1990s, the movement to boost educational standards failed on political concerns; next came the emphasis on accountability with its reliance on standardized testing. Now educators are worried that the No Child Left Behind mandate that all students meet proficiency standards by 2014 will result in the dismantling of public schools across the nation. Ravitch analyzes the impact of choice on public schools, attempts to quantify quality teaching, and describes the data wars with advocates for charter and traditional public schools. Ravitch also critiques the continued reliance on a corporate model for school reform and the continued failure of such efforts to emphasize curriculum. Conceding that there is no single solution, Ravitch concludes by advocating for strong educational values and revival of strong neighborhood public schools. For readers on all sides of the school-reform debate, this is a very important book.

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Diane Ravitch - The Death and Life of the Great Am erican School System, How Testing and Choice Are U ndermining Education (2010).pdf

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Gene Klann - Crisis Leadership, Using Military Les sons, Organizational Experiences, and the Power of Influence to Lessen the Impact of Chaos on the Pe ople You Lead (2003).jpg

USA Books - Gene Klann - Crisis Leadership, Using Military Lessons...essen the Impact of Chaos on the People You Lead 2003.jpg

Crisis Leadership: Using Military Lessons, Organizational Experiences, and the Power of Influence to Lessen the Impact of Chaos on the People You Lead (CCL, 2003), by Gene Klann, Ph.D., a member of the Center for Creative Leadership’s training faculty.
Crisis Leadership is designed to help leaders assess their strengths and weaknesses, learn new competencies and prepare for events that are as unpredictable as they are unavoidable. It draws not only on Klann’s experiences at CCL with executives from around the globe, but also on his U.S. Army career, where he advised a South Vietnamese infantry unit during the Vietnam War and commanded a battalion of 600 paratroopers during the first Gulf War.

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Gene Klann - Crisis Leadership, Using Military Les sons, Organizational Experiences, and the Power of Influence to Lessen the Impact of Chaos on the Pe ople You Lead (2003).chm

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James M. McPherson - The Atlas Of The Civil War (2 005).jpg

Here is the definitive reference to the battles of the Civil War, written by America's leading military historians and edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War expert James M. McPherson. This authoritative volume includes gripping eyewitness accounts plus 200 specially commissioned, full-color maps that detail all of the major campaigns and many of the smaller skirmishes of the war between the states. Maps provide a superb visual reference to troop movement, battlefield terrain, and communication lines. Dynamic reconstructions depict battles fought on land, river, and ocean, and time-line descriptions provide play-by-play commentary of the action. With more than 200 photographs and many personal accounts that vividly recount the experiences of soldiers in the fields, this book brings to life the human drama that pitted the north against the south.

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James M. McPherson - The Atlas Of The Civil War (2 005).pdf

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Jeremy Black - Altered States, America Since the S ixties (2006).jpg

Black works from the startling premise that the United States is a continent pretending to be a country. He examines the cultural clashes—and the tense harmony—between the numerous regional cultures uneasily contained within the United States’ wide bounds. Suburban sprawl, the triumph of consumerism, the war over health care, immigration, and Christian evangelicalism all play a part in these pages, as Black unravels the tangled web of American life during the past forty-five years. He locates such tensions in the tug-of-war between the unitary and divisive pressures that have always defined the character of American government, and in the alternating rise and fall of individualism and conformity in American society as well. Black also has some telling new reflections on America’s role abroad, from Nixon’s Vietnam to George W. Bush's Iraq.

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Jeremy Black - Altered States, America Since the S ixties (2006).pdf

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Vincent J. Cannato - American Passage, The History of Ellis Island (2010).jpg

Starred Review. Using a variety of primary sources, Cannato (The Ungovernable City) describes Ellis Island as a place and as an experience for the approximately 12 million immigrants who passed through it from 1892 to 1924. He follows its reincarnation as a detention center for wartime aliens and as a monument and museum, which he admits may celebrate uncritically "ethnic triumphalism" and upward mobility. Cannato writes that understaffing resulted in only perfunctory screening for mental, physical, and moral traits that might have made newcomers public charges, and he disabuses readers of the fallacy that examiners, rather than steamship officials or immigrants bent on assimilation, changed entrants' last names. With a focus on how "actual people created, interpreted, and executed immigration laws," Cannato maintains that regulation, which sometimes degraded into restriction, formed part of Progressive era reform and growing federal involvement to safeguard what was deemed the public interest. This measured book helps to place in perspective discussions—sure to matter to genealogists and those engaged in political discourse—of Ellis Island and the idea of immigration as a privilege rather than a right. Essential reading.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Library of Congress

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Bill Harvey - Texas Cemeteries, The Resting Places of Famous, Infamous, and Just Plain Interesting T exans (2003).jpg

USA Books - Bill Harvey - Texas Cemeteries, The Resting Places of ...ous, Infamous, and Just Plain Interesting Texans 2003.jpg

From the simplest slab of weathered stone to the most imposing mausoleum, every marker in a Texas cemetery bears witness to a life that--in ways small or large--helped shape the history and culture of the state. Telling the stories of some of these significant lives is the purpose of this book. Within its pages, you'll meet not only the heroes of the Texas Revolution, for example, but also one of the great African American cowboys of the traildriving era (Bose Ikard) and the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office (Annie Webb Blanton). Visiting cemeteries from every era and all regions of the state, Bill Harvey recounts the histories of famous, infamous, and just plain interesting Texans who lie at rest in Texas cemeteries. The book is organized alphabetically by city for easy reference. For each city, Harvey lists one or more cemeteries, giving their location and history, if significant. At the heart of the book are his profiles of the noteworthy people buried in each cemetery. They include not only famous but also lesser-known and even unknown Texans who made important contributions to the state in the arts, sports, business, military service, politics--truly every area of communal life. For those who want to visit these resting places, Harvey also includes tips on finding cemeteries, locating gravesites, and taking good photographs. Spend time with him in the graveyards of Texas, and you'll soon appreciate what fascinating stories the silent stones can tell.

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