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Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 142998581X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES—IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here— highly varied in length and theme—McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces are wholly personal. In luminous recollections of his early years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother, deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each piece—on whatever theme—contains somewhere a personal aspect in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about the subject, and each opens like a silk parachute, lofted skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.
Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 142998581X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 238
Get Book Here
Book Description
A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES—IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here— highly varied in length and theme—McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods he has sometimes been served in the course of his reportorial travels, a U.S. Open golf championship, and a season in Europe "on the chalk" from the downs and sea cliffs of England to the Maas valley in the Netherlands and the champagne country of northern France. Some of the pieces are wholly personal. In luminous recollections of his early years, for example, he goes on outings with his mother, deliberately overturns canoes in a learning process at a summer camp, and germinates a future book while riding on a jump seat to away games as a basketball player. But each piece—on whatever theme—contains somewhere a personal aspect in which McPhee suggests why he was attracted to write about the subject, and each opens like a silk parachute, lofted skyward and suddenly blossoming with color and form.
Author: Bridget Heos
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547681267
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 85
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Book Description
An introduction to the field of genetics through the story of Randy Lewis and his work with golden orb weaver spiders and his subsequent creation of artificial spider silk that can be used to save and improve lives. Full color.
Author: Ariel Kaye
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 1984826476
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
More than just a stylish design book: The founder of Parachute Home teaches you how to design a home that’s not only beautiful but mindful, functional, and uniquely you. A house is a structure that provides shelter. A home tells the story of who you are. How to Make a House a Home guides your discovery of what is most important to you in achieving warmth and comfort as well as a functional space. Explore the possibilities of creating an environment that is uniquely yours—one that welcomes, nurtures, and inspires. Parachute founder Ariel Kaye meets you wherever you are, with actionable tips and advice on how to match purpose with style. Here is everything you need to bring mindful choices into your home to make it completely you, from color palettes to organization, house plants to furniture. Whether you want to update your bedding, redo your living room, or take on the whole house, enjoy the remarkable journey of making your house your home.
Author: Theo W. Knacke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 524
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Book Description
The purpose of this manual is to provide recovery system engineers in government and industry with tools to evaluate, analyze, select, and design parachute recovery systems. These systems range from simple, one-parachute assemblies to multiple-parachute systems, and may include equipment for impact attenuation, flotation, location, retrieval, and disposition. All system aspects are discussed, including the need for parachute recovery, the selection of the most suitable recovery system concept, concept analysis, parachute performance, force and stress analysis, material selection, parachute assembly and component design, and manufacturing. Experienced recovery system engineers will find this publication useful as a technical reference book; recent college graduates will find it useful as a textbook for learning about parachutes and parachute recovery systems; and technicians with extensive practical experience will find it useful as an engineering textbook that includes a chapter on parachute- related aerodynamics. In this manual, emphasis is placed on aiding government employees in evaluating and supervising the design and application of parachute systems. The parachute recovery system uses aerodynamic drag to decelerate people and equipment moving in air from a higher velocity to a lower velocity and to a safe landing. This lower velocity is known as rate of descent, landing velocity, or impact velocity, and is determined by the following requirements: (1) landing personnel uninjured and ready for action, (2) landing equipment and air vehicles undamaged and ready for use or refurbishment, and (3) impacting ordnance at a preselected angle and velocity.
Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374717192
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
The Patch is the seventh collection of essays by the nonfiction master, all published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is divided into two parts. Part 1, “The Sporting Scene,” consists of pieces on fishing, football, golf, and lacrosse—from fly casting for chain pickerel in fall in New Hampshire to walking the linksland of St. Andrews at an Open Championship. Part 2, called “An Album Quilt,” is a montage of fragments of varying length from pieces done across the years that have never appeared in book form—occasional pieces, memorial pieces, reflections, reminiscences, and short items in various magazines including The New Yorker. They range from a visit to the Hershey chocolate factory to encounters with Oscar Hammerstein, Joan Baez, and Mount Denali. Emphatically, the author’s purpose was not merely to preserve things but to choose passages that might entertain contemporary readers. Starting with 250,000 words, he gradually threw out 75 percent of them, and randomly assembled the remaining fragments into “an album quilt.” Among other things, The Patch is a covert memoir.
Author: Duncan Barrett
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780062328052
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
For readers enchanted by the bestsellers The Astronaut Wives Club, The Girls of Atomic City, and Summer at Tiffany’s, an absorbing tale of romance and resilience—the true story of four British women who crossed the Atlantic for love, coming to America at the end of World War II to make a new life with the American servicemen they married. The “friendly invasion” of Britain by over a million American G.I.s bewitched a generation of young women deprived of male company during the Second World War. With their exotic accents, smart uniforms, and aura of Hollywood glamour, the G.I.s easily conquered their hearts, leaving British boys fighting abroad green with envy. But for girls like Sylvia, Margaret, Gwendolyn, and even the skeptical Rae, American soldiers offered something even more tantalizing than chocolate, chewing gum, and nylon stockings: an escape route from Blitz-ravaged Britain, an opportunity for a new life in affluent, modern America. Through the stories of these four women, G.I. Brides illuminates the experiences of war brides who found themselves in a foreign culture thousands of miles away from family and friends, with men they hardly knew. Some struggled with the isolation of life in rural America, or found their soldier less than heroic in civilian life. But most persevered, determined to turn their wartime romance into a lifelong love affair, and prove to those back home that a Hollywood ending of their own was possible. G.I. Brides includes an eight-pages insert that features 45-black-and-white photos.
Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708630
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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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.
Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708533
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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Book Description
La Place de la Concorde Suisse is John McPhee's rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society. The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Israelis carefully patterned their own military on the Swiss model.
Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708657
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 162
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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
Author: John McPhee
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374708495
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.
