Author: Buzz Williams
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
A compelling look into the world of reservists--more than just the "spare parts" of our nation's military--as seen through one manís transformation from weekend warrior to combat marine In 1989, Buzz Williams walked into a marine recruiting office to follow in the footsteps of the deceased older brother he grew up idolizing by signing up to join the Marine Reserves. Over the course of the next year, he would earn money to pay his college tuition by devoting one weekend a month and two full weeks in the summer to the grueling and often dangerous rigors of military training, while enduring the jarring readjustment that occurred each time he returned to civilian life. But Williams had no idea that even the newest reservists could find themselves on the frontlines of a battlefield in a matter of weeks. On August 2, 1990--the day that he graduated from Light Armored Vehicle School--Saddam Hussein's forces invaded Kuwait, and Williams' life would change forever. Spare Parts tells the story of Williams' harrowing deployment to the Persian Gulf, where he would be thrust into battle only 38 days after being called up. Enduring both the condescension of full-time Marines and the danger of his limited training, he managed to form a core group that the struggles to gain respect from a military machine that viewed them as mere "spare parts." In gripping, you-are-there detail, Williams brings to life the physical and emotional trials he would face on the killing fields of Kuwait--where some of the woefully underprepared Marines are able to rise to the challenge and others are broken by the horrors of battle. A powerful portrait of one man's experience in battle--and of the reservists who stand ready to leave civilian life to defend our nation at a moment's notice--Spare Parts adds a moving new perspective to the literature of war.

Author: Judy Mardorf Thompson
Publisher: AuthorHouse
ISBN: 1456763784
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
In Spare Parts, Claudia Martin, an avionics engineer at Duffet Commercial Airplane Co. (DCAC), finds a serious software anomaly which could threaten the integrity of the Flight Management Computer system -- and that could bring down a jet. Her boss, an ex-lover, chooses to overlook her warning in order to meet the accelerated airplane development schedule. But Claudia's own values will not allow her to agree to let it go. Claudia finds her professional reputation challenged, her career at stake. When a local flight crashes under mysterious circumstances, she accepts the call to adventure that will change her life forever. Claudia approaches the FAA where she is offered a job as an undercover mole. She teams with FBI Agent Wyatt Richardson to examine bogus parts issues. Their sexual tension serves as a subplot highlighting rivalry between governmental agencies. Wyatt regards bad hardware to be the issue, but Claudia disagrees. She pursues her quest for the hidden cause -- bad software. But that is only the tip of the iceberg. Lurking beneath it all is a sinister plot to ruin DCAC by a EuroAire-owned subcontractor. What begins as an investigation of flight-critical software and bogus spare parts explodes in global dimensions, becoming a race for market share and air safety, and threatening Claudia's life. Spare Parts spans two continents, where an evil web turns safe air travel into a roulette game. The FAA, FBI, NTSB, British Civil Aviation Administration (CAA), and New Scotland Yard wage separate battles before joining forces against one CAA inspector, and a corrupt subcontractor. As Claudia puts the pieces together, she discovers how EuroAire obtained software source code to deliberately sabotage flight-critical programs on DCAC jets.

Author: Anthony King
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191030392
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Since 2001, Western forces have been involved in a series of major military campaigns, primarily in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in Africa. For all the sophistication of the contemporary Western way of war with its digital technologies and precision weapons, infantry soldier have been frequently involved in close combat of an intensity which is comparable to the wars of the twentieth century. At the small unit level, combat has been as brutal as ever. Yet, in many cases, they have prevailed even when they were surprised or disadvantaged. How and why have professional Western soldiers been willing and able to fight effectively together during these campaigns? Through a series of rich historical and ethnographic case-studies, this collection seeks to analyse the experience of combat soldiers on operations in the last decade. The book explores the motivation, training, and culture of the professional Western soldier, highlighting differences and commonalities between the troops of different nations. This book is a project of the Changing Character of War programme at the University of Oxford.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description

Author: Orville Vernon Burton
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807178144
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln promised that the nation’s sacrifices during the Civil War would lead to a “new birth of freedom.” Lincoln’s Unfinished Work analyzes how the United States has attempted to realize—or subvert—that promise over the past century and a half. The volume is not solely about Lincoln, or the immediate unfinished work of Reconstruction, or the broader unfinished work of America coming to terms with its tangled history of race; it investigates all three topics. The book opens with an essay by Richard Carwardine, who explores Lincoln’s distinctive sense of humor. Later in the volume, Stephen Kantrowitz examines the limitations of Lincoln’s Native American policy, while James W. Loewen discusses how textbooks regularly downplay the sixteenth president’s antislavery convictions. Lawrence T. McDonnell looks at the role of poor Blacks and whites in the disintegration of the Confederacy. Eric Foner provides an overview of the Constitution-shattering impact of the Civil War amendments. Essays by J. William Harris and Jerald Podair examine the fate of Lincoln’s ideas about land distribution to freedpeople. Gregory P. Downs focuses on the structural limitations that Republicans faced in their efforts to control racist violence during Reconstruction. Adrienne Petty and Mark Schultz argue that Black land ownership in the post-Reconstruction South persisted at surprisingly high rates. Rhondda Robinson Thomas examines the role of convict labor in the construction of Clemson University, the site of the conference from which this book evolved. Other essays look at events in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Randall J. Stephens analyzes the political conservatism of white evangelical Christianity. Peter Eisenstadt uses the career of Jackie Robinson to explore the meanings of integration. Joshua Casmir Catalano and Briana Pocratsky examine the debased state of public history on the airwaves, particularly as purveyed by the History Channel. Gavin Wright rounds out the volume with a striking political and economic analysis of the collapse of the Democratic Party in the South. Taken together, the essays in this volume offer a far-reaching, thought-provoking exploration of the unfinished work of democracy, particularly as it pertains to the legacy of slavery and white supremacy in America.

Author: Richard H. Taylor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313024510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The story of veterans coming home from wars has not been concisely recorded to highlight the major problems they've faced. Having gone to war and survived, they have expectations, hopes, and dreams of a better life. In Homeward Bound, Taylor chronicles their struggles to realize all of those expectations by tracing the experiences of American veterans from the Revolutionary War through the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In doing so, he connects pieces of a longer, larger story that has traditionally been told only in individual parts. Homeward Bound delves into personal memoirs, dusty diaries, and teary interviews to link veterans' hopes for the future with the ways in which their dreams were fulfilled—or died. It shows how war changed these men and women, how they lived with their experiences despite the odds, and how alone they can be. Accompanying photographs relate still other stories—those written on our veterans' gallant faces.

Author: Kenneth Womack
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313071578
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 1333

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Book Description
There's a strong interest in reading for pleasure or self-improvement in America, as shown by the popularity of Harry Potter, and book clubs, including Oprah Winfrey's. Although recent government reports show a decline in recreational reading, the same reports show a strong correlation between interest in reading and academic acheivement. This set provides a snapshot of the current state of popular American literature, including various types and genres. The volume presents alphabetically arranged entries on more than 70 diverse literary categories, such as cyberpunk, fantasy literature, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, graphic novels, manga and anime, and zines. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Reading in America for pleasure and knowledge continues to be popular, even while other media compete for attention. While students continue to read many of the standard classics, new genres have emerged. These have captured the attention of general readers and are also playing a critical role in the language arts classroom. This book maps the state of popular literature and reading in America today, including the growth of new genres, such as cyberpunk, zines, flash fiction, GLBTQ literature, and other topics. Each entry is written by an expert contributor and provides a definition of the genre, an overview of its history, a look at trends and themes, a discussion of how the literary form engages contemporary issues, a review of the genre's critical reception, a discussion of authors and works, and suggestions for further reading. Sidebars provide fascinating details, and the set closes with a selected, general bibliography. Students will find this book a valuable guide to what they're reading today and will appreciate its illumination of popular culture and contemporary social issues.

Author: Joshua Davis
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374183376
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Four undocumented Mexican American students, two great teachers, one robot-building contest . . . and a major motion picture In 2004, four Latino teenagers arrived at the Marine Advanced Technology Education Robotics Competition at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They were born in Mexico but raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where they attended an underfunded public high school. No one had ever suggested to Oscar, Cristian, Luis, or Lorenzo that they might amount to much—but two inspiring science teachers had convinced these impoverished, undocumented kids from the desert who had never even seen the ocean that they should try to build an underwater robot. And build a robot they did. Their robot wasn't pretty, especially compared to those of the competition. They were going up against some of the best collegiate engineers in the country, including a team from MIT backed by a $10,000 grant from ExxonMobil. The Phoenix teenagers had scraped together less than $1,000 and built their robot out of scavenged parts. This was never a level competition—and yet, against all odds . . . they won! But this is just the beginning for these four, whose story—which became a key inspiration to the DREAMers movement—will go on to include first-generation college graduations, deportation, bean-picking in Mexico, and service in Afghanistan. Joshua Davis's Spare Parts is a story about overcoming insurmountable odds and four young men who proved they were among the most patriotic and talented Americans in this country—even as the country tried to kick them out.

Author: Preston Jones
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
The primary question of this book is: 'Where is God for the person in combat?' This study draws from numerous interviews, memoirs, letters, and archival materials, and reflecting on the crucifixion of Christ to consider how God can be both present and absent from the world of war.

Author: Eyal Ben-Ari
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100078908X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book offers a comparative study of military reserves in contemporary democracies. A combination of budgetary pressures, new missions and emerging military roles during the past three decades has led the armed forces of democracies to rethink the training and use of reserve forces. Moreover, reservists have become central to the armed forces as part of moves towards "total" or "comprehensive" defense. Despite this, a scholarly bias towards studying regulars and conscripts means that reservists and reserve soldiers continue to receive only marginal attention. This volume fills that lacuna through a series of country studies examining how best to understand the peculiarities of reservist service. In contrast to regulars and conscripts, reservists are marked by their dual management of civilian and military careers, different family dynamics, diverse motivations and commitment to the armed forces, the material and non-material incentives they are offered, and their place in the political sphere. This volume suggests two frames to make sense of such differences: first, it looks at reservists as "transmigrants" traveling between the military and civilian worlds; and, second, it analyzes the multiple informal "contracts" and negotiations that bind them to the military. All the chapters adopt these conceptualizations, granting the volume a common focus and integrative frame. The volume will be of much interest to students of military and strategic studies, civil-military relations, sociology and International Relations.