Weitere Bücher, die Sie mögen werden

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  A Strange Whim of the Sea - The...

  Tim Loughman

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  On January 16, 1944, the submarine rescue vessel USS Macaw (ASR-11) ran aground at Midway Atoll while attempting to get a towing line to the stranded submarine USS Flier (SS-250). The Flier was pulled free six days later, but another three weeks of salvage efforts failed to dislodge the Macaw. Then on February 12, the sea accomplished that task, nudging the ship into deeper water. 
   
   
   
  As night fell and the ship slowly sank, the twenty-two men on board sought refuge in the pilot house. By about 0230 Sunday, that compartment having flooded almost entirely, Burton gave the order to open the portside door and make for the foremast. Five of the men, including Burton himself, died, as did three sailors from the base at Midway in a pair of unauthorized and effectively suicidal rescue attempts that morning. 
   
   
   
  This book traces the lives of the Macaw and her enigmatic captain, from birth on San Francisco Bay to death at Midway. Ultimately, for Paul Burton and the Macaw the real enemy was the sea, and in a deadly denouement told here in riveting detail, the sea won. Highlighting the underreported role auxiliary vessels played in the war, A Strange Whim of the Sea should engage the military historian and layperson alike with the previously untold story it tells of struggle, sacrifice, death, and survival in the Pacific in World War II.

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  Semicolon - The Past Present and...

  Anonym

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  A page-turning, existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing punctuation mark 
   
  The semicolon. Stephen King, Hemingway, Vonnegut, and Orwell detest it. Herman Melville, Henry James, and Rebecca Solnit love it. But why? When is it effective? Have we been misusing it? Should we even care? 
  In Semicolon, Cecelia Watson charts the rise and fall of this infamous punctuation mark, which for years was the trendiest one in the world of letters. But in the nineteenth century, as grammar books became all the rage, the rules of how we use language became both stricter and more confusing, with the semicolon a prime victim. Taking us on a breezy journey through a range of examples—from Milton’s manuscripts to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letters from Birmingham Jail” to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep—Watson reveals how traditional grammar rules make us less successful at communicating with each other than we’d think. Even the most die-hard grammar fanatics would be better served by tossing the rule books and learning a better way to engage with language. 
  Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don’t need guides at all, and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.

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  A Rare Recording of US Naval...

  Grace Hopper

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  Grace Brewster Hopper (December 9, 1906 to January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. A pioneer of computer programming, Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator." The following audio recording is from a 1982 presentation.

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  Haunted West Virginia - Ghosts...

  Patty A Wilson

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  Eerie tales from the Mountain State, including the restless spirits of Harpers Ferry, the legendary Mothman, the ghosts of Twistabout Ridge, and more.  Things that go bump in the night, disembodied voices, footsteps in an empty stairwell, an icy hand on your shoulder . . . let your imagination run wild as you read about West Virginia’s most extraordinary apparitions, sinister spooks, and bizarre beasts. You may know of the haunted Blennerhassett Hotel or the headless ghost of George Van Meter, but perhaps you haven’t you heard about:  The strangled bride whose ghostly visits led a jury to convict her husband of murder  Point Pleasant’s long history of tragedies, mysterious events, and natural disasters that have plagued the area ever since Scioto Shawnee Chief Cornstalk cursed the ground  A pretty blonde hitchhiker who died crossing a washed-out bridge and continues to guide drivers to avoid the same fate  Moundsville’s old state penitentiary, which is considered to be one of the most haunted places in West Virginia

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  Dog Meat Samosa

  Stanley Gazemba

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  Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, is a rambling traffic-choked metropolis, bursting at the seams with people striving to earn a living on its mean streets. While Nairobi has every appearance of a fast-growing, modern African city with the mushrooming skyscrapers and superhighways, the city possesses a dark underbelly. Dog Meat Samosa delves into the bowels of Nairobi’s crowded urban backstreets to paint a gritty picture of its underworld, to describe the human experience within this once glorious “City in the Sun” that has since metamorphosed into a cutthroat hustlers’ paradise.

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  Sulla and Gaius Marius: The...

  Editors Charles River

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  Caesar is still remembered for winning a civil war and helping bring about the end of the Roman Republic, leaving a line of emperors in its place, but it’s quite possible that none of what Caesar did would’ve happened without the template for such actions being set 40 years earlier. At the time, when Caesar was in his teens, war was being waged both on the Italian peninsula and abroad, with domestic politics pitting the conservative, aristocratic optimates against the populist, reformist populares, and this tension ultimately escalated into an all-out war. One of the leading populares was Caesar’s uncle, Gaius Marius, a military visionary who had restructured the legions and extended the privileges of land ownership and citizenship to legionaries on condition of successful completion of a fixed term of service. In the late 2nd century BCE, Marius had waged a successful campaign against several Germanic tribes, and after earning eternal fame in the Eternal City, Marius was appointed a consul several times. In 88 BCE, he entered into conflict with his erstwhile protégé, the optimate Sulla, over command of the army to be dispatched against Mithridates VI of Pontus, a long-time enemy of Rome and its Greek allies.   
  	Ironically, Marius’s reforms had made the legions fiercely loyal to their individual generals rather than the state, which allowed Sulla to march his army against Rome and force Marius into exile. With that, Rome’s first civil war was officially underway, but Sulla’s triumph proved short-lived. Just as Sulla departed for a campaign, Marius returned at the head of a scratch army of veterans and mercenaries, taking over the city and purging it of Sulla’s optimate supporters, and though Marius died in 86 BCE, his party remained in power. 

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