Across The Open Field

Twenty-eight years ago I went to England for a three-month visit and rest. What I found changed my life." So begins this memoir by one of America's best-known landscape architects, Laurie Olin. Raised in a frontier town in Alaska, trained in Seattle and New York, Olin found himself dissatisfied with his job as an urban architect and accepted an invitation to England to take a respite from work. What he found, in abundance, was the serendipity of a human environment built over time to respond to the land's own character and to the people who lived and worked there. For Olin, the English countryside was a palimpsest of the most eloquent and moving sort, yet whose manifestation was of ordinary buildings meant to shelter their inhabitants and further their work. With evocative language and exquisite line drawings, the author takes us back to his introduction to the scenes of English country towns, their ancient universities, meandering waterways, and dramatic cloudscapes racing in from the Atlantic. He limns the geologic histories found within the rock, the near-forgotten histories of place-names, and the recent histories of train lines and auto routes. Comparing the growth of building in the English countryside, Olin draws some sobering conclusions about our modern lifestyle and its increasing separation from the landscape. As much a plea for saving the modern American landscape as it is a passionate exploration of what makes the English landscape so characteristically English, Across the Open Field is "an affectionate ramble through real places of lasting worth.

"The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Cavalry had the dubious distinction of being the unit that had fought the biggest battle of the war to date, and had suffered the worst casualties. We and the 1st Battalion." A Yale graduate who volunteered to serve his country, Larry Gwin was only twenty-three years old when he arrived in Vietnam in 1965. After a brief stint in the Delta, Gwin was reassigned to the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) in An Khe. There, in the hotly contested Central Highlands, he served almost nine months as executive officer for Alpha Company, 2/7, fighting against crack NVA troops in some of the war's most horrific battles. The bloodiest conflict of all began November 12, 1965, after 2nd Battalion was flown into the Ia Drang Valley west of Pleiku. Acting as point, Alpha Company spearheaded the battalion's march to landing zone Albany for pickup, not knowing they were walking into the killing zone of an NVA ambush that would cost them 10 percent casualties. Gwin spares no one, including himself, in his gut-wrenching account of the agony of war. Through the stench of death and the acrid smell of napalm, he chronicles the Vietnam War in all its nightmarish horror.

Most of our time is spent with the outer life -- our jobs, our friends and families, our hobbies, or our health. We spend much less time with the inner life, that place of feelings and thoughts, anger and love, hopes and dreams. When we do spend time with the inner life, it can often be overwhelming and disruptive, taking over our lives with feelings of hopelessness and fear or with endless ruminations about our past and worries about our future. In the practices of this book, we learn how to make friends with our inner life, to reconnect with ourselves, others, our world, and with God. We learn to have productive conversations with three specific inner voices: our separated self who lives in a world of scarcity and fear, our connected self who lives in an expansive world of abundance and compassion, and the watcher who stands apart from all the conflicting conversations going on in the inner life. The watcher decides how then shall we live. With a little time and some practice, we can bring our inner turmoil to a peaceful resolution and live a life that is safe, joyful, focused, and filled with compassion.

This book provides a theoretical and observational overview of the state of the art of gamma-ray astrophysics, and their impact and connection with the physics of cosmic rays and neutrinos. With the aim of shedding new and fresh light on the problem of the nature of the gamma-ray sources, particularly those yet unidentified, this book summarizes contributions to a workshop that continues today.

Series I: Contains the formal reports, both Union and Confederate, of the first seizures of United States property in the Southern States, and of all military operations in the field, with the correspondence, orders, and returns relating specially thereto, and, as proposed is to be accompanied by an Atlas. In this series the reports will be arranged according to the campaigns and several theaters of operations (in the chronological order of the events), and the Union reports of any event will, as a rule, be immediately followed by the Confederate accounts. The correspondence, etc., not embraced in the "reports" proper will follow (first Union and next Confederate) in chronological order. Volume XIV. 1885. (Vol. 14, Chap. 26) Chapter XXVI - Operations on the coasts of South Carolina, Georgia, and Middle and East Florida. Apr 12, 1862-Jun 11, 1863

Michael Shaara reinvented the war novel with his Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels. Jeff Shaara continued his father’s legacy with a series of centuries-spanning New York Times bestsellers. Together at last in eBook form, this volume assembles three Civil War novels from America’s first family of military fiction: Gods and Generals, The Killer Angels, and The Last Full Measure. Gods and Generals traces the lives, passions, and careers of the great military leaders—Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Winfield Scott Hancock, Joshua Chamberlain—from the gathering clouds of war. The Killer Angels re-creates the fight for America’s destiny in the Battle of Gettysburg, the four most bloody and courageous days of our nation’s history. And The Last Full Measure brings to life the final two years of the Civil War, chasing the escalating conflict between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant—complicated, heroic, and deeply troubled men—through to its riveting conclusion at Appomattox. Contains a preview Jeff Shaara’s new novel of the Civil War, A Blaze of Glory. Praise for Michael Shaara and Jeff Shaara’s Civil War trilogy “Brilliant does not even begin to describe the Shaara gift.”—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution “Shaara’s beautifully sensitive novel delves deeply in the empathetic realm of psycho-history, where enemies do not exist—just mortal men forced to make crucial decisions and survive on the same battlefield.”—San Francisco Chronicle, on Gods and Generals “Remarkable . . . a book that changed my life . . . I had never visited Gettysburg, knew almost nothing about that battle before I read the book, but here it all came alive.”—Ken Burns, on The Killer Angels “The Last Full Measure is more than another historical novel. It is rooted in history, but its strength is the element of humanity flowing through its characters. . . . The book is compelling, easy to read, well researched and written, and thought-provoking. . . . In short, it is everything that a reader could ask for.”—Chicago Tribune

Contains more than 100 maps, diagrams and illustrations The Staff Ride Handbook for the Overland Campaign, Virginia, 4 May to 15 June 1864, is the tenth study in the Combat Studies Institute’s (CSI) Staff Ride Handbook series. This handbook analyzes Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant’s 1864 Overland Campaign from the crossing of the Rapidan River on 4 May to the initiation of the crossing of the James River on 15 June. Unlike many of CSI’s previous handbooks, this handbook focuses on the operational level of war. Even so, it provides a heavy dose of tactical analysis, thereby making this ride a superb tool for developing Army leaders at almost all levels. Designed to be completed in three days, this staff ride is flexible enough to allow units to conduct a one-day or two-day ride that will still enable soldiers to gain a full range of insights offered by the study of this important campaign. In developing their plan for conducting an Overland Campaign staff ride, unit commanders are encouraged to consider analyzing the wide range of military problems associated with warfighting that this study offers. This campaign provides a host of issues to be examined, to include logistics, intelligence, psychological operations, use of reconnaissance (or lack thereof), deception, leadership, engineering, campaign planning, soldier initiative, and many other areas relevant to the modern military professional. Each of these issues, and others also analyzed herein, are as germane to us today as they were 150 years ago.