Caribbee

Sample

Leslie Mann

In June 1941, Flight Sergeant Leslie Mann, a tail gunner in a British bomber, was shot down over Germany and taken into captivity. After the war, wanting to record the experiences of the RAF's 'Bomber Boys', he wrote down his inner thoughts and feelings as a fictional narrative, recently brought to the attention of Imperial War Museums. Visceral, shocking and unglamorous, it transmits as rarely before the horrors of aerial warfare, the corrosive effects of fear, and the psychological torment of the young men involved. Although presented as fiction, the book's solid basis in lived experience makes it ring true - the sights, sounds, smells, and above all the emotional strain are intensely evoked with a novelist's skill.

Sample

A.T. Mahan

Though technological advances over the last century have revolutionized warfare, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783 remains a classic text on the history, strategy, and comprehension of commercial and military command of the high seas. The first president of the U.S. Naval War College, Alfred Thayer Mahan demonstrates through historical examples that the rise and fall of sea power and the wealth of nations have always been linked with commercial and military command of the sea. Mahan describes successful naval strategies employed in the past--from Greek and Roman times through the Napoleonic Wars--with an intense focus on England's rise as a sea power in the eighteenth century. This book provides not only an overview of naval tactics but also a lucid exposition of geographic, economic, and social factors governing the maintenance of sea power. -- This description applies to the Hardcover edition.

Sample

Julius Rowan Raper

By the mid-195Os, when Saul Bellow published Seize the Day, French existentialism and the phenomenological view of humankind that underlies it had become popular enough in the United States and England for leading novelists to begin dealing critically with its fundamental assumptions. Taking as its starting point the critique of existentialism's phenomenological background derived from Edmund Husserl and elaborated by Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, Julius Rowan Raper's Narcissus from Rubble delves into the intellectual assumptions that lie behind eleven of the most influential and challenging novels created by Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, John Fowles, Jerzy Kosinski, John Barth, and Lawrence Durrell. Raper sees the central conflict of twentieth-century humanistic inquiry as the modern opposition between psychology and philosophy. He dramatizes the competition in the novels between the phenomenological model of human behavior and a variety of models associated with psychoanalysis, especially those created by Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Heinz Kohut. He argues that despite numerous efforts to fuse phenomenology and psychoanalysis, the two conceptions of personality have been fundamentally opposed to each other since Husserl's original description of phenomenology. The book underscores the irony that while much contemporary literary criticism continues to draw on a phenomenologically based view of character derived in part from the essays of Jacques Lacan, our leading novelists for a quarter century have been warning us in major novels such as Henderson the Rain King, V., and The Magus of the rage, compulsiveness, emptiness, pointlessness, fragmentation, and associated dangers to which taking a phenomenological stance may contribute. Raper finds that all six novelists worked through the intellectual maze that Freud called narcissism, as well as through the hazards of self-transcendence, to a new understanding of narcissism that is less judgmental and more perceptive than Freud's earlier formulation. It is this struggle--first to comprehend the dangers of the self-transcending tendencies of our culture, and then to become completely true to ourselves beyond the roles imposed on us by life--that creates the drama Raper detects as the common component in the works studied in this book. Raper's approach offers exciting insights into some fascinating and difficult literary texts. By revealing the common concern on which they rest, he provides the reader with an illuminating way to approach other contemporary works of literature.

Sample

Amy Carol Reeves

"As a series of unexplained murders again strike fear into Londoners, Abbie Sharp discovers the Ripper's plot to revive the Conclave and usurp the British throne"--