Plunging Through The Clouds

Constructive Living brings together two psychotherapies--Morita and Naikan-- and their associated lifeways. Both therapies were developed in this century, but their roots extend back hundreds of years in East Asian history. Morita was a professor of psychiatry at Jikei University School of Medicine in Tokyo. Yoshimoto was a successful businessman who retired to become a lay priest in Nara. Morita's method has it origins in Zen Buddhist psychology, and Yoshimoto's Naikan has its origins in Jodo Shinshu Buddhist psychology. Neither of these systems requires that one believe in Buddhism or have faith in anything other than one's experience. They work as well for Christians and Moslems and Jews as for Buddhists. Both are built on the naturalistic observations of humans and careful introspection of their founders. Constructive Living isn't mystical or oriental, but practical and human.

Clarence "Cap" Cornish was an Indiana pilot whose life spanned all but five years of the Century of Flight. Born in Canada in 1898, Cornish grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He began flying at the age of nineteen, piloting a "Jenny" aircraft during World War I, and continued to fly for the next seventy-eight years. In 1995, at the age of ninety-seven, he was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest actively flying pilot. The mid-1920s to the mid-1950s were Cornish's most active years in aviation. During that period, sod runways gave way to asphalt and concrete; navigation evolved from the iron rail compass to radar; runways that once had been outlined at night with cans of oil topped off with flaming gasoline now shimmered with multicolored electric lights; instead of being crammed next to mailbags in open-air cockpits, passengers sat comfortably in streamlined, pressurized cabins. In the early phase of that era, Cornish performed aerobatics and won air races. He went on to run a full-service flying business, served as chief pilot for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, managed the city's municipal airport, helped monitor and maintain safe skies above the continental United States during World War II, and directed Indiana's first Aeronautics Commission. Dedicating his life to flight and its many ramifications, Cornish helped guide the sensible development of aviation as it grew from infancy to maturity. Through his many personal experiences, the story of flight nationally is played out.

Capt. Field E. Kindley, with the famous Eddie Rickenbacker, was one of America's foremost World War I flying aces. Like Rickenbacker's, Kindley's story is one of fierce dogfights, daring aerial feats, and numerous brushes with death. Yet unlike Rickenbacker's, Kindley's story has not been fully told until now. Field Kindley gained experience with the RAF before providing leadership for the U.S. Air Service. Kindley was the fourth-ranking American air ace; his exploits earned him a Distinguished Service Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster from the United States and a Distinguished Flying Cross from the British government. In February 1920, during a practice drill Kindley led, some enlisted men unwittingly entered the bombing target area. "Buzzing" the troops to warn them off the field, Kindley somehow lost control of his plane and died in the ensuing crash. Using arduously gathered primary materials and accounts of Great War aces, Jack Ballard tells the story of this little-known hero from the glory days of aerial warfare. Through this tale, an era and a daring flyer live again.

This book tells the full story of the US Naval air campaign during the Vietnam War between 1965 to 1975, where the US Seventh Fleet, stationed off the Vietnamese coast, was given the tongue-in-cheek nickname 'The Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club'. On August 2, 1964, USS Maddox became embroiled in the infamous 'Gulf of Tonkin incident' that lead directly to America's increased involvement in the Vietnam War. Supporting the Maddox that day were four F-8E Crusaders from the USS Ticonderoga, signalling the start of the US Navy's commitment to the air war over Vietnam. The Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club was the nickname for the US Navy's Seventh Fleet, Task Force 77, stationed off the coast of Vietnam which, at various points throughout the war, comprised as many as six carriers with 70–100 aircraft on board. The Seventh Fleet played an essential role in supporting operations over Vietnam, providing vital air support to combat troops on the ground and taking part in major operations such as Rolling Thunder and Linebacker I and II. Serving with the US Seventh Fleet during this period and involved in the dramatic history of The Tonkin Gulf Yacht Club was author Tom Cleaver, who was a 20-year-old member of Commander Patrol Forces Seventh Fleet which had operational control over Maddox and Turner Joy. His use of dramatic first-hand experiences from interviews with both American and Vietnamese pilots plus official Vietnamese accounts of the war provides a balanced and personal picture of the conflict from both sides. Detailing the very earliest incident in the Gulf of Tonkin through to the final evacuation of US nationals in 1975, he brings the story of US air intervention into Vietnam vividly to life.

""A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written."" So said Robert Frost in instructing readers on how to achieve poetic literacy. George Monteiro's newest book follows that dictum to enhance our understanding of Frost's most valuable poems by demonstrating the ways in which they circulate among the constellations of great poems and essays of the New England Renaissance. Monteiro reads Frost's own poetry not against ""all the other poems ever written"" but in the light of poems and essays by his precursors, particularly Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson. Familiar poems such.

Mark Hodder's second Burton & Swinburne steampunk adventure, following the acclaimed The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack, is filled with eccentric steam-driven technology, grotesque characters, and a deepening mystery. When a clockwork-powered man of brass is found abandoned in Trafalgar Square, Burton and his assistant, the wayward poet Algernon Swinburne, find themselves on the trail of the stolen Garnier Collection--black diamonds rumored to be fragments of the Lemurian Eye of Naga, a meteorite that fell to Earth in prehistoric times. From a haunted mansion to the Bedlam madhouse, from South America to Australia, from séances to a secret labyrinth, Burton struggles with shadowy opponents and his own inner demons. Can the king's agent expose a plot that threatens to rip the British Empire apart, leading to an international conflict the like of which the world has never seen? And what part does the clockwork man have to play? From the Trade Paperback edition.