Detour To Disaster

In October of 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood set out through Alabama on what would be the final campaign of the Army of Tennessee. One event in particular, overlooked and misunderstood for generations, portended what was to follow and is the subject of Noel Carpenter’s Detour to Disaster: General John Bell Hood’s “Slight Demonstration” at Decatur and the Unravelling of the Tennessee Campaign. In this fascinating and meticulously detailed and documented account—the first book-length study of the weighty decision to march to Decatur and the combat that followed there—Carpenter investigates the circumstances surrounding these matters and how they overwhelmed the controversial young army commander and potentially doomed his daring invasion. Detour to Disaster is required reading for everyone interested in the Western Theater, and especially the doomed Tennessee Campaign.

In October of 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood set out through Alabama on what would be the final campaign of the Army of Tennessee. One event in particular, overlooked and misunderstood for generations, portended what was to follow and is the subject of Noel Carpenter's Detour to Disaster: General John Bell Hood's "Slight Demonstration" at Decatur and the Unravelling of the Tennessee Campaign. By late 1864, Hood's army of hardened veterans had one thin ray of hope: they would somehow invade Tennessee and defeat Union General George Thomas outside Nashville in a victory that would force General William T. Sherman to follow them into Tennessee (and perhaps even Kentucky). While weighing his options for a Tennessee River crossing, however, Hood diverted his army to the town of Decatur, Alabama, a decision that undermined his own plan for a rapid move north to Nashville. In his only mention of his army's action at Decatur, Alabama, Hood described it all in just one sentence: "While the Army turned Decatur, I ordered a slight demonstration to be made against the town till our forces passed safely beyond." In fact, this four-day detour was a turning point that set the stage for the disastrous Tennessee Campaign that followed. In this fascinating and meticulously detailed and documented account--the first book-length study of the weighty decision to march to Decatur and the combat that followed there--the author investigates the circumstances surrounding these matters and how they overwhelmed the controversial young army commander and potentially doomed his daring campaign. Detour to Disaster is required reading for everyone interested in the Western Theater, and especially the doomed Tennessee Campaign.

This book addresses the current development status of high-speed railways globally and analyzes their operational schemes and practices under emergent conditions. It covers methods and problem-solving philosophy with regard to complexity analysis, capacity evaluation, passenger-flow forecasts, operating strategies, passenger-flow allocation, resource allocation and supporting technologies in the context of serious accidents and adverse environmental influences on train operation and service organization of high-speed railways. The abnormal scenarios, emergent conditions, adverse events and corresponding theoretical and applicational solutions dealing with the train operation both in line and network scale are all from real-world cases related to and designed for Chinese high-speed railway network which is the largest in scale, the highest in complexity and the most difficult in tackling with the complex and diverse climate and geographical environment , and thus makes the book both theoretically rigorous and practically applicable. It not only helps readers consider the train and network interactions from the perspective of complexity science, but also provides them with a philosophical framework and approaches available to construct their own roadmap and problem-solving paradigms in their daily research or management. This book is suitable for researchers, postgraduates and managerial and engineering practitioners in railway-related fields, especially in high-speed railway operation and emergency management.

The Sixteenth International Tsunami Symposium, TSUNAMI ¿93, drew more than 150 scientists, engineers and specialists in tsunami research and disaster mitigation from 13 countries. The leading contributions to the symposium, selected after a rigorous reviewing process, are presented here under three broad headings: - Tsunami Generation, Propagation and Inundation: Their Prediction and Simulation. - Tsunami Disasters: Their Prevention and Mitigation. - Tsunami Observations, and Warning Systems and Plans for Improvement. Audience: Scientists, engineers and graduate students interested in the prediction of earthquakes and tsunamis, tsunami disasters and their prevention and mitigation. Professionals in the field of coastal management and protection.

From the Justice Department’s memos defending coerced interrogation to Alberto Gonzales’ firing of U.S. Attorneys who did not fit the Bush Administration’s political needs, Law’s Detour paints an alarming picture of the many detours that George W. Bush and his allies created to thwart transparency and undermine the rule of law after September 11, 2001. Pursuing those detours, Bush officials set up a law-free zone at Guantánamo, ordered massive immigration raids that separated families, and screened candidates for civil service jobs to ensure the hiring of “real Americans.” While government needs flexibility to address genuine risks to national security—which certainly exist in the post-9/11 world—the Bush Administration’s use of detours distracted the government from urgent priorities, tarnished America’s reputation, and threatened voting and civil rights. In this comprehensive analysis of Bush officials’ efforts to stretch and strain the justice system, Peter Margulies canvasses the costs of the Administration’s many detours, from resisting accountability in the war on terrorism to thwarting economic and environmental regulation. Concise and full of compelling anecdotes, Law’s Detour maps these aberrations, surveys the damage done, and reaffirms the virtues of transparency and dialog that the Bush administration dismissed.