Notes From No Mans Land

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize A frank and fascinating exploration of race and racial identity Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays begins with a series of lynchings and ends with a series of apologies. Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood. As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows. These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."

If starting a company is difficult, leading a company once the business has caught fire is infinitely more so. Thousands of startups each year approach the dangerous transition that Doug Tatum calls No Man's Land—when they are too big too be considered small but still too small to be considered big. Rapid growth is every entrepreneur's dream, but it never comes easily and is usually rife with dilemmas. Such growth should spark self-discovery, acquired discipline, and positive but difficult transition. Unfortunately, it often becomes an agonizng battle between the tendencies of a lonely entrepreneur and certain immutable laws of growth. The result is confusion, frustration, stagnation, loss of employee morale, and, at worst, financial failure. The good news is that Doug Tatum knows exactly what it takes to get through No Man's Land: a map, a high place from which to orient yourself, and navigational rules to help you track your progress. Through case studies and stories of successes and failures, No Man's Land will help you learn how to: • Align your growing company with its market. • Execute the necessary changes in your management. • Confirm that your financial model is scalable. • Attract money and make smart decisions about financing your business. If you're an entrepreneur, this book will help you make your company all it can be and all you want it to be.

A New York Times Best Seller A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist A New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book of the Year A Facebook "Year of Books" Selection One of the Best Books of the Year * National Book Critics Circle Award finalist * The New York Times Book Review (Top 10) * Entertainment Weekly (Top 10) * New York Magazine (Top 10)* Chicago Tribune (Top 10) * Publishers Weekly (Top 10) * Time Out New York (Top 10) * Los Angeles Times * Kirkus * Booklist * NPR's Science Friday * Newsday * Slate * Refinery 29 * And many more... Why do we fear vaccines? A provocative examination by Eula Biss, the author of Notes from No Man's Land, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award Upon becoming a new mother, Eula Biss addresses a chronic condition of fear-fear of the government, the medical establishment, and what is in your child's air, food, mattress, medicine, and vaccines. She finds that you cannot immunize your child, or yourself, from the world. In this bold, fascinating book, Biss investigates the metaphors and myths surrounding our conception of immunity and its implications for the individual and the social body. As she hears more and more fears about vaccines, Biss researches what they mean for her own child, her immediate community, America, and the world, both historically and in the present moment. She extends a conversation with other mothers to meditations on Voltaire's Candide, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors, and beyond. On Immunity is a moving account of how we are all interconnected-our bodies and our fates.

A gripping account of how a major air disaster was averted, by the captain and former Top Gun pilot Instinctively, I release my pressure on the sidestick. Out of my subconscious, a survival technique from a previous life emerges: Neutralise! I'm not in control so I must neutralise controls. I never imagined I'd use this part of my military experience in a commercial airliner ... On routine flight QF72 from Singapore to Perth on 7 October 2008, the primary flight computers went rogue, causing the plane to pitch down, nose first, towards the Indian Ocean - twice. The Airbus A330 carrying 315 passengers and crew was out of control, with violent negative G forces propelling anyone and anything untethered through the cabin roof. It took the skill and discipline of veteran US Navy Top Gun Kevin Sullivan, captain of the ill-fated flight, to wrestle the plane back under control and perform a high-stakes emergency landing at a RAAF base on the WA coast 1200 kilometres north of Perth. In No Man's Land, the captain of the flight tells the full story for the first time. It's a gripping, blow-by-blow account of how, along with his co-pilots, Sullivan relied on his elite military training to land the gravely malfunctioning plane and narrowly avert what could have been a horrific air disaster. As automation becomes the way of the future, and in the aftermath of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 and Lion Air flight JT610, the story of QF72 raises important questions about how much control we relinquish to computers and whether more checks and balances are needed. A gripping read in the tradition of Sully: Miracle on the Hudson by Chesley B. Sullenberger.

With Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou is one of the best-known philosophers alive today.

“An oblique comedy of menace, unsettling, exquisitely wrought and written . . . a complex excursion into the by now familiar Pinter world of mixed reality and fantasy, of human worth and human degradation.” —New York Times Set against the decayed elegance of a house in London’s Hampstead Heath, in No Man’s Land two men face each other over a drink. Do they know each other, or is each performing an elaborate character of recognition? Their ambiguity—and the comedy—intensify with the arrival of two younger men, the one ostensibly a manservant, the other a male secretary. All four inhabit a no man’s land between time present and time remembered, between reality and imagination—a territory which Pinter explores with his characteristic mixture of biting wit, aggression, and anarchic sexuality.

Oranges in No Man's Land brings Elizabeth Laird's emotional and gripping adventure to her next generation of fans. Since her father left Lebanon to find work and her mother tragically died in a shell attack, ten-year-old Ayesha has been living in the bomb-ravaged city of Beirut with her granny and her two younger brothers. The city has been torn in half by civil war and a desolate, dangerous no man's land divides the two sides. Only militiamen and tanks dare enter this deadly zone, but when Granny falls desperately ill, Ayesha sets off on a terrifying journey to reach a doctor living in enemy territory.

After his father is accused of murder, combat veteran and Special Agent John Puller must investigate his past and learn the truth about his mother in this New York Times bestselling thriller--but someone hiding in the shadows wants revenge. Two men. Thirty years. John Puller's mother, Jackie, vanished thirty years ago from Fort Monroe, Virginia, when Puller was just a boy. Paul Rogers has been in prison for ten years. But twenty years before that, he was at Fort Monroe. One night three decades ago, Puller's and Rogers' worlds collided with devastating results, and the truth has been buried ever since. Until now. Military investigators, armed with a letter from a friend of Jackie's, arrive in the hospital room of Puller's father-a legendary three-star now sinking into dementia-and reveal that Puller Sr. has been accused of murdering his wife. Aided by his brother Robert Puller, an Air Force major, and Veronica Knox, who works for a shadowy U.S. intelligence organization, Puller begins a journey that will take him into his own past, to find the truth about his mother. Paul Rogers' time is running out. With the clock ticking, he begins his own journey, one that will take him across the country to the place where all his troubles began: a mysterious building on the grounds of Fort Monroe. There, thirty years ago, the man Rogers had once been vanished too, and was replaced with a monster. And now the monster wants revenge. And the only person standing in his way is John Puller.

The "absorbing and powerful" (Wall Street Journal) story of two pioneering suffragette doctors who shattered social expectations and transformed modern medicine during World War I. A month after war broke out in 1914, doctors Flora Murray and Louisa Garrett Anderson set out for Paris, where they opened a hospital in a luxury hotel and treated hundreds of casualties plucked from France's battlefields. Although, prior to the war and the Spanish flu, female doctors were restricted to treating women and children, Flora and Louisa's work was so successful that the British Army asked them to set up a hospital in the heart of London. Nicknamed the Suffragettes' Hospital, Endell Street soon became known for its lifesaving treatments. In No Man's Land, Wendy Moore illuminates this turbulent moment of global war and pandemic when women were, for the first time, allowed to operate on men. Their fortitude and brilliance serve as powerful reminders of what women can achieve against all odds.

In 1915 Massachusetts native Lorenzo N. Smith, roused by the newspaper reports of desecrated Belgium and France, crossed the Canadian border and joined the Wesmount Rifles. After stints with the First Canadian Contingent at Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Ploegsteert, and Messines, where he was, according to the original foreword, struck by a piece of shrapnel and removed from combat, Sgt. Smith joined the British-Canadian Recruiting Mission. Smith’s recruiting addresses were frequently followed by questions from the floor—“What d’ye mean by Blighty?’” and “What’s a ‘Whizbang?’”—and as a result, he compiled the Lingo of No Man’s Land, his dictionary of World War I slang. Originally published in 1918, Lingo of No Man’s Land provides fascinating contemporary insights into the soldier’s experience of the Great War. Among the terms and phrases defined within are “Cage–A wire enclosed structure to hold Fritz”; “Coote–A species of lice with extraordinary biting ability”; “Poultice wallopers–Hospital orderlies”; and “Rat poison–Affectionate term for cheese. The trench rats which swarm about are fed on cheese.” What is perhaps surprising for the modern reader is the number of words and phrases that Smith felt the need to define but are now considered commonplace—aerial photography, armored car, bomb, camouflage, concussion, and crater—a testament to how much English comes from World War I. Published again to coincide with the centennial of World War I, Lingo of No Man’s Land offers a unique perspective of life on the front lines and will be compulsory reading for all American and European history buffs.