American Icarus
American Icarus

Author: Pythia Peay

Publisher: Lantern Books

Published: 2015-04-01

Total Pages: 613

ISBN-13: 1590564421

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This is the story of Joe Carroll: fully paid-up member of the Greatest Generation, aviator, farmer, and handsome Irish charmer who radiated exuberance for life—a literal and metaphorical flying boy. With his head in the clouds, this American Icarus embodied all that was aspirational and attractive about mid-twentieth-century America, with its technical ingenuity, bravado, and its belief that the only way was up. But Joe was also a destructive, impulsive alcoholic; like many of that generation he held experiences and feelings close to the chest. Only on his deathbed did Joe acknowledge the pull of gravity, reaching out to his estranged family, reflecting over his life, and contemplating the afterlife. Depth journalist Pythia Peay is Joe’s eldest child. In this evocative, thoroughly researched, and sensitively drawn depiction of her father’s life and times, Peay maps the trajectories of this troubled, ordinary Joe, who as a youth had suffered a Dickensian twist of fate that would leave him a divided man. Guided by her father’s memories he recalled as he lay dying, Peay charts the ancestral rivers that led a working-class boy from depression-era Altoona, Pennsylvania, to the Air Transport Command and Brazil during World War II; post-War Buenos Aires, where Joe married an Argentine beauty with ancestral connections to the foundation of the United States; newly independent Israel, where he flew for El Al; the Missouri heartland in the 1950s, where he ran a farm and raised four children while traveling the world for TWA; the upheavals of the 1960s that would drive Peay and her father apart; Mexico, where her parents fled to escape their failing marriage; and, finally, Texas, where Joe got cancer and died. In narrating Joe’s life, Peay not only delineates the depths of the Depression, the highs of the “good war” and the psychological toll it exacted on the Greatest Generation, as well as the undercurrents that led to her family’s disintegration in the 1960s, but she unpacks the myths and archetypes that shape the United States—its perpetual restlessness and heroic individualism—in a journey that leads, intimately and movingly, to a final reconciliation with a dying patriarch and the ghosts of the past.

The Icarus Syndrome
The Icarus Syndrome

Author: Carl H. Builder

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-12

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1351481290

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At the end of the Reagan era, many in the U.S. Air Force began to express their concerns about the health of their institution. They questioned whether the Air Force had lost its sense of direction, its confidence, its values, even its future. For some, these concerns reflected nothing more than the maturation of the most youthful of America's military institutions. For others it was a crisis of spirit that threatened the hard-won independence of the Air Force. Although the diagnoses for this malaise are as numerous as its symptoms, The Icarus Syndrome points a finger at the abandonment of air power theory sometime in the late 1950s to early 1960s as the single, taproot cause of the problems. That provocative diagnosis is followed by an equally provocative prescription the Air Force must follow to regain its institutional health. Author Carl H. Builder begins with an overview of this crisis of values within the Air Force, along with a litany of concerns about what seems to have gone wrong within that institution. The history of the U.S. Air Force, along with the role played in it by air power theory, is explored and is used to support Builder's thesis. The remainder of the book is an analysis of what went wrong and when, how these wrongs might be corrected, and the challenges for Air Force leadership in the future. Now available in paperback, The Icarus Syndrome will be of great interest to U.S. Air Force professionals, military and aviation historians, and institutional psychologists.

Sanctuary
Sanctuary

Author: Valerie Andrews

Publisher: Chiron Publications

Published: 2024-05-15

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 1685032192

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If you want to get to know someone, listen to their story of home. Intimacy builds as we ask: Where do you come from? What did you leave behind? Where do you feel safe? In Sanctuary, these questions are explored by Jungian analysts, architects and historians, scientists, and storytellers. Contributors also consider how climate change, Black Lives Matter, and an unprecedented wave of global refugees are impacting our notions of home and hospitality.

The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry
The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry

Author: Deborah Ager

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-09-26

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1441136029

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With works by over 100 poets, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry celebrates contemporary writers, born after World War II , who write about Jewish themes. This anthology brings together poets whose writings offer fascinating insight into Jewish cultural and religious topics and Jewish identity. Featuring established poets as well as representatives of the next generation of Jewish voices, it includes poems by Ellen Bass, Charles Bernstein, Carol V. Davis, Edward Hirsch, Jane Hirshfield, David Lehman, Jacqueline Osherow, Ira Sadoff, Philip Schultz, Alan Shapiro, Jane Shore, Judith Skillman, Melissa Stein, Matthew Zapruder, and many others.

The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism
The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism

Author: Paul Haacke

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-03-11

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 0192592173

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From the invention of skyscrapers and airplanes to the development of the nuclear bomb, ideas about the modern increasingly revolved around vertiginous images of elevation and decline and new technologies of mobility and terror from above. In The Vertical Imagination and the Crisis of Transatlantic Modernism, Paul Haacke examines this turn by focusing on discourses of aspiration, catastrophe, and power in major works of European and American literature as well as film, architecture, and intellectual and cultural history. This wide-ranging and pointed study begins with canonical fiction by Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and John Dos Passos, as well as poetry by Guillaume Apollinaire, Hart Crane, and Aimé Césaire, before moving to critical reflections on the rise of New York City by architects and writers from Le Corbusier to Simone de Beauvoir, the films of Alfred Hitchcock and theories of cinematic space and time, and postwar novels by Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and Leslie Marmon Silko, among many other examples. In tracing the rise and fall of modernist discourse over the course of the long twentieth century, this book shows how visions of vertical ascension turned from established ideas about nature, the body, and religion to growing anxieties about aesthetic distinction, technological advancement, and American capitalism and empire. It argues that spectacles of height and flight became symbols and icons of ambition as well as direct indexes of power, and thus that the vertical transformation of modernity was both material and imagined, taking place at the same time through the rapidly expanding built environment and shifting ideological constructions of "high" and "low."

The Study of Lives
The Study of Lives

Author: Robert White

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-01-13

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1351302558

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The Study of Lives reveals for the first time the extent of Henry A. Murray's considerable influence on the study of personality. Throughout his long and distinguished career, he has either trained or strongly influenced some of the world's leading psychologists, eighteen of whom have written fascinating essays for this book. The range of topics presented here is as diverse and highly original as Murray's own ideas about personality. Everyone concerned with the study of personality will find this book an excellent sampling of the best work being done in the field. "The study of lives" is a phrase Henry A. Murray has often used to describe his own work, and it suggests his central conviction that living beings must be studied as living wholes. Personality, he has repeatedly pointed out, is a dynamic process-a constantly changing configuration of thoughts, feelings, and actions occurring in a social environment and continuing throughout life. If small parts and short segments of human affairs have to be isolated for detailed scrutiny, they must still be understood as parts of a patterned organic system and as segments of a lifelong process. This has never meant for him that all research should take the form of collecting life histories, although his contributions along this line have been outstanding. It implies simply that isolating, fragmenting, and learning just a tiny bit about a lot of people tend to carry us away from what is most worth studying. The essays in this book are grouped under headings that represent some of Murray's strongest interests: His conception of personality as a dynamic process is reflected in Part I, which deals with continuities and changes in the course of life. His interest in devising procedures suitable for disclosing live feelings, fantasies, and adaptations and his insistence on the necessity for an adequate taxonomy of carefully discriminated, carefully defined variables are represented in the papers of Part II. His view that creativity is a central property of human nature has contributed to the reflections and researches that make up Part III. Finally, his concern with values--the great blind spot of traditional science but so obviously a momentous problem for contemporary lives and societies--has been taken up in several different ways by the authors of Part IV.