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Overview
Think of World War II naval commanders in the Pacific and certain names come to mind: Chester Nimitz, Raymond Spruance, William "Bull" Halsey. Their accomplishments have been well documented by historians and filmmakers. Yet there is another, more controversial commander among their ranks who has been largely overlooked - until now. In Bitter Tempest tells the story of Admiral Frank Jack Fletcher, who led U.S. forces at Wake, Coral Sea, Guadalcanal, and the Eastern Solomons. It is the first book to be written specifically to give Fletcher's perspective, using previously unreviewed personal papers along with numerous naval documents and records, some of which were formerly classified material. Fletcher's time at sea during World War II is set forth in vivid detail, from exciting victories to communications foul-ups to the tragic sinking of his command vessel, the U.S.S. Yorktown. Did Fletcher make errors in judgment, as some of his critics have claimed, or was he primarily a victim of internal politics within the military? This volume helps clarify the issue. The biography chronicles Fletcher's life as a loyal career naval officer, starting with his childhood as scion of a locally prominent family in Marshalltown, Iowa, and including his attendance at the U.S. Naval Academy, where Nimitz, Spruance, and Halsey were among his classmates; his exemplary service at Vera Cruz and in World War I; and his assignments in Asia and in Washington, D.C., throughout the 1920s and 1930s, which allowed him to see firsthand the rise of Japan that brought the nation into World War II. The author also offers insights into the wartime U.S.-Russia Lend-Lease program in which Fletcher played unheralded but important roles as diplomat and supervisor. As Commander of North Pacific Forces, Fletcher efficiently ran army, navy, and army-airforce operations against the Japanese, while training Russian forces to take over U.S. ships. Japanese forces in the northern islands of Japan surrendeSynopsis
In The Eagleton Reader, Stephen Regan presents a lively and judicious selection of Terry Eagleton's essays, lectures and reviews, demonstrating the breadth and incisiveness of Eagleton's critical judgements, his playful, ironic intelligence, and his provocative intervention in the cultural debates of the past thirty years. This Reader is a valuable introduction to Eagleton's stimulating and entertaining work on modernism and postmodernism, nationalism and colonialism, aesthetics and ideology, cultural politics and sexual politics. Eagleton's brilliance as a literary critic is evident in essays on William Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde and Milan Kundera, while his more ruminative theoretical and philosophical writings are amply demonstrated in essays on Raymond Williams, Walter Benjamin, Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Reader includes a prefatory survey of its subject's career, extensive introductions to each of the six sections of essays, and a comprehensive bibliography of writings by and about Terry Eagleton.
Morning Star
If the humanities are to be rescued from their current state of over-specialised torpor, then Eagleton's work will be one of the main sources to which the reformers will turn.
Editorials
From the Publisher
"Every student of English will be thankful to Regan for assembling this Reader. Useful essays frame each section and the collection as a whole serves as a splendid introduction to Eagleton's work. His delightful wit and debunking similes make reading him fun, as well as necessary."
Gary Day, Times Higher Education Supplement "As this anthology makes clear, Eagleton's work has been held together for nearly 20 years by a startling proposal for the reform of the academic syllabus."
"If the humanities are to be rescued from their current state of over-specialised torpor, then Eagleton's work will be one of the main sources to which the reformers will turn." Morning Star