Victor Chapman's Letters From France, With Memoir By John Jay Chapman.


Book Description

As the First World War ground into its third year in 1916, America still remained uncommitted to intervention in what some in that nation regarded as a purely European affair. This was not the course pursued by many American men, having enlisted in the British, Canadian, and French ranks since the start of the war. The Lafayette Escadrille, or American Squadron, was formed in 1916 from French and American aviators and would grow in fame and victories throughout its two year existence. Victor Chapman enlisted in the French Foreign legion in 1914, as soon as he possibly could; however, he would transfer after much rough soldiering to the French air arm. As a founding member of the famous squadron, one of the Valiant 38, Victor Chapman flew some of the most dangerous missions of all the French pilots as they sought to establish their reputation. The toll of danger never affected his unflappably high spirits, but his luck ran out in June 1916 over the skies of Verdun. His letters are filled with his and his fellow pilots exploits, written in fine style and with great detail. Highly recommended. Author — Chapman, Victor Emmanuel, 1890-1916. Editor — Chapman, John Jay, 1862-1933. Text taken, whole and complete, from the edition published in New York, The Macmillan company, 1917. Original Page Count – 198 pages. Illustrations – 8 Illustrations.










Unbought Spirit


Book Description

In this collection of his essays and a sampling of his letters, John Jay Chapman (1862-1933) embraces the world at large. Predicting the depersonalization of twentieth-century society, Chapman argues that a civilization based upon a commerce which is in all its parts corruptly managed will present a social life which is unintelligent and mediocre, made up of people afraid of each other, whose ideas are shopworn, whose manners are self-conscious. Chapman should be studied more carefully and at full length, Edmund Wilson wrote in 1929, but in the meantime, what is most important is to have his essays made accessible.... If his books were reprinted and read, we should recognize that we possess in John Jay Chapman -- by reason of the intensity of the spirit, the brilliance of the literary gift and the continuity of the thought which they embody -- an American classic. Jacques Barzun has observed, We have produced very few great critics, but John Jay Chapman equals any of his foreign contemporaries. An American original, Chapman is a tonic to cynicism and an antidote to a society gone flaccid and complacent.










Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972


Book Description

Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912-1972 contains a selection of the literary critic and author Edmund Wilson's personal correspondence. As editor Leon Edel states in his introduction to these papers: "More than a sampling, the present volume provides sufficient material to show the energy and vitality of Wilson's professional relations with friends and acquaintances; it shows even more the continuity of his imaginative life from his youth to the end."




Medicine and Modernism


Book Description

An in-depth study of the English neurologist and polymath Sir Henry Head (1861-1940). Head bridged the gap between science and the arts. He was a published poet who had close links with such figures as Thomas Hardy and Siegfried Sassoon. His research into the nervous system and the relationship between language and the brain broke new ground.




Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry


Book Description

This exceptional collection of writings offers for the first time a discussion among leading thinkers about the points at which rhetoric and religion illuminate and challenge each other. The contributors to the volume are eminent theorists and critics in rhetoric, theology, and religion, and they address a variety of problems and periods. Together these writings shed light on religion as a human quest and rhetoric as the origin and sustainer of that quest. They show that when pursued with intelligence and sensitivity, rhetorical approaches to religion are capable of revitalizing both language and experience. Rhetorical figures, for example, constitute forms of language that say what cannot be said in any other way, and that move individuals toward religious truths that cannot be known in any other way. When firmly placed within religious, social, and literary history, the convergence of rhetoric and religion brings into focus crucial issues in several fields--including philosophy, psychology, history, and art--and interprets relations among self, language, and world that are central to both past and present cultures.




Henry Adams


Book Description

His great grandfather and his grandfather had been presidents of the United States, and to a small boy this seemed a matter of course in his family. But Henry Adams, belonging to a later generation, coming to maturity at the time of the Civil War, found himself in an age uncongenial to the leadership of such men as his ancestors. In the changing world of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, Adams found his rightful place as an observer and critic rather than a participant in public life. But no time and no country ever had a keener mind to take note of the comic and tragic qualities embedded in the political, economic, and human drama upon which he gazed. And his writings appeal timelessly in their incisive wit, their warm charm, and in the way they speak to us of a very individual personality. When Stevenson's book first appeared, the New York Times called it 'One of the noteable biographies of recent years,' and it won the Bancroft Prize that year. It remains an engrossing portrait of a remarkable man.It is good to take note of the sage he became in his late, great books: Mont-St. Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. This biography explains how Henry Adams became the man both admired and feared in his later years. He was first a bright, unformed young man who was a diplomatic assistant to his father; then an ambitious journalist, a writer of several 'sensational' newspaper and magazine articles. Next he became a provocative and innovative teacher, and a historian unequalled in his presentation of the Jeffersonian period. Until his wife's tragic death, he was a willing actor on the social scene of his beloved Washington, D.C. Throughout, he remained a friend and instigator of the careers of friends in artistic and scientific fields. His writings speak to us still and seem contemporary in their tone as well as their view of cycles of culture and their warnings of decline and achievement.