· 2011
“Fighting for MacArthur is a welcome addition to the scholarship on the Pacific War. Gordon makes extensive use of the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps archives and interviews with veterans of the Philippine campaign. This is a well-written, engaging treatment of the steadily deteriorating position of the defenders in the Philippines.”—Michigan War Studies Review. For the first time the story of the Navy and Marine Corps in the 1941––42 Philippine campaign is told in a single volume. Drawing on a rich collection of both U.S. and recently discovered Japanese sources as well as official records and wartime diaries, Gordon chronicles the Americans’ desperate defense of the besieged islands. Gordon offers updated information about the campaign during which the Navy and Marines, fighting in what was largely an Army operation, performed some of their most unusual missions of the entire Pacific War. He also explains why the Navy's relationship with Gen. Douglas MacArthur became strained during this campaign, and remained so for the rest of the war. As a result of Gordon’s extensive primary source research, Fighting for MacArthur presents the most complete account of the dramatic efforts by elements of the Navy and Marine Corps to support the U.S. Army’s ill-fated defense of the Philippines.
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· 2015
John Brown Gordon (1832-1904) was one of the South's biggest firebrands, and he fought like it, displaying personal courage and toughness unmatched by most of the South's fighters. The result was multiple wounds at places like the Seven Days Battles, and most notably at Antietam, where he was hit 4 times and continued to fight until a bullet slammed him in the face, passing through his cheek and out his jaw. Gordon would have likely drowned in his own blood if it had not drained out through a bullet hole in his cap. Lee described Gordon to Jefferson Davis as "characterized by splendid audacity." The same qualities that made Gordon a ferocious leader throughout the war also made him an ardent opponent of the Reconstruction and a feisty writer. Gordon had been in the thick of almost every famous battle in the Eastern theater, making him a great source. Gordon's memoirs, Reminiscences of the Civil War, also tell soldierly anecdotes, the most famous of them being the way in which he aided Union division commander Francis Barlow during Day 1 at Gettysburg. Gordon's memoirs, published near the end of his life almost 40 years after the war, also demonstrate the mystique of the Lost Cause, of which Gordon was one of its strongest proponents. His memoirs reflect that, leading historians to compare him to General Jubal Early. Like most memoirs, Gordon's was self-serving, and historians dispute some of his claims (such as being promoted to Lieutenant General, the highest military title in the Confederate armies). Nevertheless, Reminiscences is a spellbinding account of the Civil War told by one of its toughest fighers.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.
· 2016
This volume of collected stories gathers nine tales of unforgettable characters in settings that are both brutally realistic and cast from a spirit world of whimsical imagination. An introspective and imaginative discovery on a primeval Canadian lake; a brave boy defending his family in a struggle between love and hatred, injury and pardon; the despair of a woman trapped on a bridge and held hostage to the witness of the World Trade Center collapse; the sadness, joy, vulnerability, and strength of a young New York City couple who lose each other but keep seeking love; and the quirky narrative of a young Southern girl reporting on the comical entanglements of her Georgia familythese and other tales await you inside this volume of Catching Shadows.
Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science. In addition to showing how recent metaphysics has drifted away from connection with all other serious scholarly inquiry as a result of not heeding this restriction, they demonstrate how to build a metaphysicscompatible with current fundamental physics ('ontic structural realism'), which, when combined with their metaphysics of the special sciences ('rainforest realism'), can be used to unify physics with the other sciences without reducing these sciences to physics itself. Taking science metaphysically seriously,Ladyman and Ross argue, means that metaphysicians must abandon the picture of the world as composed of self-subsistent individual objects, and the paradigm of causation as the collision of such objects.Everything Must Go also assesses the role of information theory and complex systems theory in attempts to explain the relationship between the special sciences and physics, treading a middle road between the grand synthesis of thermodynamics and information, and eliminativism about information. The consequences of the author's metaphysical theory for central issues in the philosophy of science are explored, including the implications for the realism vs. empiricism debate, the role ofcausation in scientific explanations, the nature of causation and laws, the status of abstract and virtual objects, and the objective reality of natural kinds.