War Fever

Download or read book War Fever written by Randy Roberts and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A "marvelous" (Sports Illustrated) portrait of the three men whose lives were forever changed by WWI-era Boston and the Spanish flu: baseball star Babe Ruth, symphony conductor Karl Muck, and Harvard law student Charles Whittlesey. In the fall of 1918, a fever gripped Boston. The streets emptied as paranoia about the deadly Spanish flu spread. Newspapermen and vigilante investigators aggressively sought to discredit anyone who looked or sounded German. And as the war raged on, the enemy seemed to be lurking everywhere: prowling in submarines off the coast of Cape Cod, arriving on passenger ships in the harbor, or disguised as the radicals lecturing workers about the injustice of a sixty-hour workweek. War Fever explores this delirious moment in American history through the stories of three men: Karl Muck, the German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, accused of being an enemy spy; Charles Whittlesey, a Harvard law graduate who became an unlikely hero in Europe; and the most famous baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, poised to revolutionize the game he loved. Together, they offer a gripping narrative of America at war and American culture in upheaval.

Download or read book War Fever written by J. G. Ballard and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A war-ravaged Beirut is the setting for the title story of this visionary collection by J. G. Ballard, a tale in which a young street fighter inadvertently discovers how to bring an end to the bloodshed only to find that his solution is all too effective as far as some supposedly neutral observers are concerned. Other stories in War Fever feature an assassination plot against an American astronaut, the leader of an authoritarian religious movement; a man who is destroyed by a car crash and resolves never to leave his apartment again; and the survivor of a toxic-waste ship wrecked on a deserted Caribbean island.

Download or read book Fever of War written by Carol R Byerly and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed more people in one year than the Great War killed in four, sickening at least one quarter of the world's population. In Fever of War, Carol R. Byerly uncovers the startling impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic on the American army, its medical officers, and their profession, a story which has long been silenced. Through medical officers' memoirs and diaries, official reports, scientific articles, and other original sources, Byerly tells a grave tale about the limits of modern medicine and warfare. The tragedy begins with overly confident medical officers who, armed with new knowledge and technologies of modern medicine, had an inflated sense of their ability to control disease. The conditions of trench warfare on the Western Front soon outflanked medical knowledge by creating an environment where the influenza virus could mutate to a lethal strain. This new flu virus soon left medical officers’ confidence in tatters as thousands of soldiers and trainees died under their care. They also were unable to convince the War Department to reduce the crowding of troops aboard ships and in barracks which were providing ideal environments for the epidemic to thrive. After the war, and given their helplessness to control influenza, many medical officers and military leaders began to downplay the epidemic as a significant event for the U. S. army, in effect erasing this dramatic story from the American historical memory.

Download or read book Mosquito Soldiers written by Andrew McIlwaine Bell and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2010-04 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the 620,000 soldiers who perished during the American Civil War, the overwhelming majority died not from gunshot wounds or saber cuts, but from disease. In this ground-breaking medical history, Andrew McIlwaine Bell explores the impact of two terrifying mosquito-borne maladies---malaria and yellow fever---on the major political and military events of the 1860s, revealing how deadly microorganisms carried by a tiny insect helped shape the course of the Civil War.

Download or read book Lingering Fever written by LaVonne Telshaw Camp and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During 1945, the author found herself in the monsoon-drenched jungles of Assam, caring for soldiers in the China-Burma-India theater of war. Nothing in her training had prepared her for the tropical diseases or the thatched-roof hospital where men spat on the floor, rats were pervasive, and patients used handguns to chase gigantic cockroaches (and wereas likely to sell their medicine as swallow it). The experience was made tolerable by Nurse Camp's romance with one of the airmen who flew the Hump, supplying O.S.S. troops behind Japanese lines and carrying General Joseph Stilwell's Chinese troops to fight the battle of North Burma. She accompanied her future husband on some of his missions. Based in part on letters she wrote to her parents, this is the poignant story of one nurse's experience in World War II.

Download or read book Ring of Steel written by Alexander Watson and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A prize-winning, magisterial history of World War I from the perspective of the defeated Central Powers For the Central Powers, the First World War started with high hopes for an easy victory. But those hopes soon deteriorated as Germany's attack on France failed, Austria-Hungary's armies suffered catastrophic losses, and Britain's ruthless blockade brought both nations to the brink of starvation. The Central powers were trapped in the Allies' ever-tightening Ring of Steel. In this compelling history, Alexander Watson retells the war from the perspective of its losers: not just the leaders in Berlin and Vienna, but the people of Central Europe. The war shattered their societies, destroyed their states, and imparted a poisonous legacy of bitterness and violence. A major reevaluation of the First World War, Ring of Steel is essential for anyone seeking to understand the last century of European history.

Download or read book Victory Fever on Guadalcanal written by William H. Bartsch and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following their rampage through Southeast Asia and the Pacific in the five months after Pearl Harbor, Japanese forces moved into the Solomon Islands, intending to cut off the critical American supply line to Australia. But when they began to construct an airfield on Guadalcanal in July 1942, the Americans captured the almost completed airfield for their own strategic use. The Japanese Army countered by sending to Guadalcanal a reinforced battalion under the command of Col. Kiyonao Ichiki. The attack that followed would prove to be the first of four attempts by the Japanese over six months to retake the airfield, resulting in some of the most vicious fighting of the Pacific War. During the initial battle on the night of August 20–21, 1942, Marines wiped out Ichiki’s men, who—imbued with “victory fever”—had expected a quick and easy victory. William H. Bartsch draws on correspondence, interviews, diaries, memoirs, and official war records, including those translated from Japanese sources, to offer an intensely human narrative of the failed attempt to recapture Guadalcanal’s vital airfield.