A Study Guide for Ron Kovic's "Born on the Fourth of July"


Book Description

A Study Guide for Ron Kovic's "Born on the Fourth of July," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Themes for Students: War and Peace. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Themes for Students: War and Peace for all of your research needs.




Born on the Fourth of July


Book Description

Optimize training, enhance recovery, and improve performance with "Performance Nutrition: Applying the Science of Nutrient Timing." Based on the most current research in nutrient timing, Performance Nutrition blends theory with applied content and real-life examples to help nutritionists, athletes, and coaches design nutrition plans based on each athlete's individual needs and the specific demands of the sport. While other texts may provide a brief discussion of nutrient timing as a tool for improving sport performance, "Performance Nutrition: Applying the Science of Nutrient Timing "focuses solely on this newly developing facet of sport nutrition. Distinguished authors Krista Austin (a physiologist and nutritionist) and Bob Seebohar (a sport dietitian and USA Triathlon elite coach) share their extensive practical experience with athletes at all levels from recreational through professional. They provide specific nutrient timing recommendations for a wide range of sport types, including endurance, strength and power, combative (weight classified), and team sports. In particular, you will learn information on using nutrient timing theory to counteract altitude, heat and humidity, cold exposure, and air pollution. A chapter devoted to competition-day guidelines will help you keep your athletes hydrated, energized, and ready to perform. Plus, nutritional timelines, highlighted in special callout boxes and placed at the edge of the page for quick reference, offer visual plans of what athletes should eat in the hours leading up to and during competition. Practical and user friendly, this text also includes "In Practice" application exercises, mini-case studies, and four extended case studies to assist in translating the information to your own practice. Incorporating nutrient ingestion timing into your athlete's training program can promote enhanced recovery, create positive training adaptations, improve body composition, support immunity, and ultimately enhance performance. With "Performance Nutrition: Applying the Science of Nutrient Timing," you will gain the foundational knowledge and practical techniques to develop individualized nutrition programs to improve training, performance, and recovery.




Born on the Fourth of July: 40th Anniversary Edition


Book Description

This edition marks the 40th anniversary of the original publication of Kovic's American antiwar classic. “Classic and timeless!” —New York Times “As relevant as ever, this book is an education. Ron is a true American, and his great heart and hard-won wisdom shine through these pages.” —Oliver Stone, filmmaker This New York Times best seller (more than one million copies sold), presented here in a special fortieth-anniversary edition with a brand-new foreword by Bruce Springsteen, details the author’s life story (portrayed by Tom Cruise in the Oliver Stone film)—from a patriotic soldier in Vietnam, to his severe battlefield injury, to his role as the country’s most outspoken anti–Vietnam War advocate, spreading his message from his wheelchair.




Hurricane Street


Book Description

The author of Born on the Fourth of July delivers “a harrowing, poignant telling of the American Veteran’s Movement and its members’ struggles” (Manhattan Book Review). In the spring of 1974, as the last American troops were being pulled out of Vietnam, Ron Kovic and a small group of other severely injured veterans in a California VA hospital launched the American Veterans Movement. In a phenomenal feat of political organizing, Kovic corralled his fellow AVM members into staging a sit-in, and then a hunger strike, in the Los Angeles office of Senator Alan Cranston, demanding better treatment of injured and disabled veterans. This was a short-lived and chaotic but ultimately successful movement to improve the deplorable conditions in VA hospitals across the country. Hurricane Street is their story—one that resonates deeply today—told by Kovic in the passionate and brutally honest style that led to over one million sales of Born on the Fourth of July. “Another raw exposé on the cost of war . . . The book is an unflinching anti-war declaration, written in blood and the sweat of too many haunted nights by a Vietnam Marine Corps sergeant who later opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” —Los Angeles Times “A deeply moving account of the struggle of Vietnam veterans to hold politicians accountable to the maimed warriors they sent into harm’s way and then abandoned.” —Robert Scheer, author of They Know Everything About You “An impassioned and timely memoir about the 1974 American Veterans Movement that will strike a chord with veterans and their families today.” —Publishers Weekly, Top 10 Pick for Spring 2016




Women of the Forest


Book Description

One of the first works to focus on gender in anthropology, this book remains an important teaching tool on gender and life in the Amazon. Women of the Forest covers Yolanda and Robert Murphy's year of fieldwork among the Mundurucu people of Brazil in 1952, taking into account the historical, ecological, and cultural setting. The book features a new critical foreword written collectively by respected anthropologists who were all students of the Murphys.




Chasing the Light


Book Description

In this powerful and evocative memoir, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter, Oliver Stone, takes us right to the heart of what it's like to make movies on the edge. In Chasing The Light he writes about his rarefied New York childhood, volunteering for combat, and his struggles and triumphs making such films as Platoon, Midnight Express, and Scarface. Before the international success of Platoon in 1986, Oliver Stone had been wounded as an infantryman in Vietnam, and spent years writing unproduced scripts while taking miscellaneous jobs and driving taxis in New York, finally venturing westward to Los Angeles and a new life. Stone, now 73, recounts those formative years with vivid details of the high and low moments: we sit at the table in meetings with Al Pacino over Stone's scripts for Scarface, Platoon, and Born on the Fourth of July; relive the harrowing demon of cocaine addiction following the failure of his first feature, The Hand (starring Michael Caine); experience his risky on-the-ground research of Miami drug cartels for Scarface; and see his stormy relationship with The Deer Hunter director Michael Cimino. We also learn of the breathless hustles to finance the acclaimed and divisive Salvador; and witness tensions behind the scenes of his first Academy Award-winning film, Midnight Express. The culmination of the book is the extraordinarily vivid recreation of filming Platoon in the depths of the Philippine jungle with Kevin Dillon, Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Johnny Depp et al, pushing himself, the crew and the young cast almost beyond breaking point. Written fearlessly, with intense detail and colour, Chasing the Light is a true insider's story of Hollywood's years of upheaval in the 1970s and '80s, and Stone brings this period alive as only someone at the centre of the action truly can.




The Oliver Stone Experience


Book Description

Stone himself serves as guide to this no-holds-barred retrospective—an extremely candid and comprehensive monograph of the renowned and controversial writer, director, and cinematic historian in interview form. Over the course of five years, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone (Midnight Express, Scarface, Platoon, JFK, Natural Born Killers, Snowden) and New York Times bestselling author Matt Zoller Seitz (The Wes Anderson Collection) discussed, debated, and deconstructed the arc of Stone's outspoken, controversial life and career with extraordinary candor. This book collects those conversations for the first time, including anecdotes about Stone's childhood, Vietnam, his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder, and his continual struggle to reinvent himself as an artist. Their dialogue is illustrated by hundreds of never-before-seen photographs and documents from Stone's personal archive, dating back to Stone's birth: personal snapshots, private correspondence, annotated script pages and storyboards, behind-the-scenes photography, and production files from all of his films to date—through 2016's Snowden, and including Stone's epic Showtime mini-series Untold HIstory of the United States. Critical commentary from Seitz on each of Stone's films is joined by original essays from filmmaker Ramin Bahrani; writer, editor, and educator Kiese Laymon; writer and actor Jim Beaver; and film critics Walter Chaw, Michael Guarnieri, Kim Morgan, and Alissa Wilkinson. At once a complex analysis of a master director’s vision and a painfully honest critical biography in widescreen technicolor, The Oliver Stone Experience is as daring, intense, and provocative as Stone’s films—it's an Oliver Stone movie about Oliver Stone, in the form of a book. Both this book and Stone’s highly anticipated film, Snowden, will be released in September 2016 to coincide with Stone’s seventieth birthday (September 15, 1946). Also available from Matt Zoller Seitz: Mad Men Carousel, The Wes Anderson Collection: Bad Dads, The Wes Anderson Collection: The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Wes Anderson Collection.




Sacrificial Limbs


Book Description

Sacrificial Limbs chronicles the everyday lives and political activism of disabled veterans of Turkey’s Kurdish war, one of the most volatile conflicts in the Middle East. Through nuanced ethnographic portraits, Açiksöz examines how veterans’ experiences of war and disability are closely linked to class, gender, and ultimately the embrace of ultranationalist right-wing politics. Bringing the reader into military hospitals, commemorations, political demonstrations, and veterans’ everyday spaces of care, intimacy, and activism, Sacrificial Limbs provides a vivid analysis of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forces that fashion veterans’ bodies, political subjectivities, and communities. It is essential reading for students and scholars interested in anthropology, masculinity, and disability.




Vietnam


Book Description

Zinn's compelling case against the Vietnam War, now with a new introduction. Of the many books that challenged the Vietnam War, Howard Zinn's stands out as one of the best--and most influential. It helped sparked national debate on the war. It includes a powerful speech written by Zinn that President Johnson should have given to lay out the case for ending the war.




Indestructible


Book Description

During the battle of Iwo Jima, two enemy grenades landed close to Jack Lucas and his buddies. Jack threw himself on one of the grenades, grabbed the second, and pulled it beneath his body. His buddies were saved, but Lucas was badly injured. Miraculously, he survived-but just barely. For this brave action seventeen-year-old Jack Lucas from North Carolina became the youngest Marine in history to receive the Medal of Honor. Indestructible reveals the rocky road that led Jack Lucas to Iwo Jima, his arduous recovery, and the obstacles Jack overcame later in life. Jack's moving and powerful memoir is a testament to America's greatest generation.