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  Eddie Rickenbacker and Dick...

  Editors Charles River

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  At first, airplane improvements occurred in an ad hoc, almost accidental manner during World War I. However, when pilots’ mounting of armaments on airplanes proved a successful means of defeating other aircraft and even attacking men on the ground, a much more active and systematic development of warplanes began across the continent. Each advance prompted a countermeasure, as the two sides strove for primacy in a deadly, unforgiving environment which rewarded real advances in equipment and tactics with survival and punished poor ideas with death. Before long, relatively powerful, heavily armed aircraft buzzed through the skies over battle-stained Europe, tearing each other apart with furious gusts of machine gun fire and sending many of the vaunted dirigibles plunging, burning, to the ground. The new era of fighting aircraft arrived in dramatic fashion, raising successful pilots to celebrity or heroic status, and laying the groundwork for the tremendous potential of airpower to achieve its next logical expansion in World War II and beyond.  
  Rickenbacker's World War I service won him the Medal of Honor, along with more awards for valor than any other person fighting in World War I. But participating in the wars was not nearly enough time in the air for the ambitious Rickenbacker. When he was not setting new records in the air, he was setting new speed records on the ground, most notably as a first-generation race car driver who not only drove cars but designed them.  
  By the time World War II arrived, the fighter airplane was a much different beast than the purpose-built aircraft-hunting machines of 1917 and 1918. Though propellers still provided motive force, greatly increased engine power allowed these aircraft to slice through the sky at speeds of 200 miles per hour (mph), 300 mph, or even in excess of 400 mph when flying flat-out. Service ceilings jumped to 25,000 feet, 30,000 feet, or higher.

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  Silurian Period The: The History...

  Editors Charles River

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  The early history of Earth covers such vast stretches of time that years, centuries, and even millennia become virtually meaningless. Instead, paleontologists and scientists who study geochronology divide time into periods and eras.  
  The Silurian Age occurred during the mid-Paleozoic, and despite its relative brevity, the era developed some interesting features that promulgated life on Earth. Roderick J. Murchison, a British geologist, named a sequence of rocks after a group of indigenous people called the Silures living in Wales during the mid-19th century. Despite their absence in the Silurian Age, the name was bestowed to honor the tribe. 
  Murchison was inspired by close friend Adam Sedgwick, who named the Cambrian Age, employing the Latin word for Wales. In 1835, the two presented a paper together entitled On the Silurian and Cambrian Systems. Their separate categorizing systems caused a serious enough disagreement over chronology that the friendship ended bitterly. The alternative name for Siluria was Gotlandia after the Baltica island of Gotland. 
  What ultimately precipitated these subdivisions in the chronology was a “famous unconformity” on the River Onny in Shropshire. It indicated a natural break within “classic Silurian on its own home territory.” The timeline for beginning and end dates has remained imprecise, but the order of fossilized discoveries has proven correct. Joachim Barrande, a French paleontologist, geologist, and botanist, pursued the same issue in the Prague Basin of Bohemia. Studying the Paleozoic trilobite for a period of 10 years, his extensive work was published in his Silurian System of Central Bohemia. Altogether, he identified and analyzed over 4,000 new fossil species, producing the enormous Encyclopedia of Fossils, numbering over 6,000 pages.

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  Cold War Texas

  Landry Brewer

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  From missile launch sites to Soviet espionage, experience the Cold War deep in the heart of Texas.In an era when miscalculation or a mistake could lead to global annihilation, Texas operated 12 Atlas F intercontinental ballistic missile launch sites near Abilene's Dyess Air Force Base. Nuclear-capable Nike Hercules surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles protected Austin and the Metroplex from a Soviet bomber attack. An American pilot stationed at Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio was the only fatality of the Cuban Missile Crisis. After he was accused of spying for the Soviet Union, former Ranger College professor Maurice Halperin fled the country. Amarillo's Pantex plant, where three employees died in a 1977 explosion, maintains the security and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal. Landry Brewer explores how the Lone Star State shaped American Cold War policy.

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  Let the Mind Settle – A Sleep...

  Whisper Mind

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  Are you tired of restless nights, racing thoughts, and the endless loop of “what ifs” that never seem to stop? Let the Mind Settle is your gentle invitation to step away from the noise and into a sanctuary of calm. 
  Created with the ADHD soul in mind, this soothing audiobook guides you through breathwork, body relaxation, and compassionate affirmations designed to quiet the mind without forcing it. Instead of battling your thoughts, you’ll learn to release the pressure, let go of perfection, and drift peacefully into rest — exactly as you are. 
  Whether your thoughts wander endlessly or your body struggles to be still, this audiobook offers permission to rest in your own way. Sleep will find you — gently, naturally, and without judgment. 
  A healing bedtime companion for every ADHD soul who longs for peace, softness, and true rest.

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  The Youth Climate Uprising -...

  David Fopp, Isabelle Axelsson,...

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  Species are going extinct, forests are burning, and children are worried about the future and their peers worldwide. But that is not the whole story: One Friday in 2018, a few young people joined Greta Thunberg to protest, and the global climate strike movement was born. Scientist David Fopp spent 250 Fridays with the newly formed grassroots movements. Together with activists Isabelle Axelsson and Loukina Tille, he offers an insider perspective on how scientists and activists can fight for a just and sustainable global society. The volume also offers both an introduction to ecophilosophy and a unified science of democracy in times of interdependent crises. How can research in all disciplines - from (drama) education and economics to psychology - help with this struggle? And how can we all fight the climate crisis by transforming and deepening democracy?

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  The Grammar of Self - Collected...

  George Watt

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  In THE GRAMMAR OF SELF, George Watt presents a lifetime of memories, which seemingly move at random from decade to decade, from continent to continent, from cosmos to microcosm. It does have one central goal: to look at poetry as an attempt towards objectification of aspects of personal identity, as a means through which the self may be confronted, challenged and celebrated. But the volume of verse does more than that as it subscribes to a notion from Thomas Szasz about the self: it is “not something that one finds. It is something that one creates.” (T.S. Szasz, The Second Sin (New York: Anchor Press, 1973, p. 49.) This volume accepts that the poetic text, or multiples thereof, is one means through which a self finds articulation. This articulation is open-ended, chaotic, composed of innumerable experiential fragments that come from deed, time, place and person. The self in this volume is composed of psychic jigsaw pieces (single poems) each of which assert their right to placement, but which will never collate into a perfect picture. This volume of poetry is a collection of many of these pieces, which together present an incomplete movement towards Szaszian self-creation.

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