Bracing for Impact’s compilers and contributors know. They have both lived out that fear and survived, albeit badly hurt, in their own plane crashes.In this collection of true-life survivor tales, people from all walks of life—a freelance writer, a crew member of the Lynyrd Skynyrd band, a naval flight surgeon, a teenager, and a newlywed on her honeymoon, among others—recount their traumatic narrow escapes as engines stalled, fuel ran out, hazardous weather conditions descended, and landings did not go according to plan. In the face of death, as life flashed before their eyes—or not, as some wryly note—these survivors encountered the terrific split of before and after the crash. Their lives, though preserved, would change forever.Perhaps more significant than the crash itself is how each story plays out in the aftermath of the ordeal. In heart-wrenching, unrelenting honesty, these stories explore the wide spectrum of impacts on survivors—ranging from debilitating fear, post-traumatic stress disorder, and substance abuse, to a renewed sense of urgency, where survivors swear to live each day to the fullest and rededicate their lives to helping others.Including the 1977 story of the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash that killed lead singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines, and vocalist Cassie Gaines, Bracing for Impact is as much a horrific account of air disasters as it is a celebration and recognition of the people who survived them.Fans of the 2016 Clint Eastwood film Sully starring Tom Hanks will enjoy this edge-of-your-seat read!Features 45 black and white photographs of survivors and wreckages.

    Soon after, the newly constructed vessel, crowded with passengers and livestock, erupted into flames and sank in the river below, taking much of the bridge with it.As lawyer and Lincoln scholar Brian McGinty dramatically reveals in Lincoln's Greatest Case, no one was killed, but the question of who was at fault cried out for an answer. Backed by powerful steamboat interests in St. Louis, the owners of the Effie Afton quickly pressed suit, hoping that a victory would not only prevent the construction of any future bridges from crossing the Mississippi but also thwart the burgeoning spread of railroads from Chicago. The fate of the long-dreamed-of transcontinental railroad lurked ominously in the background, for if rails could not cross the Mississippi by bridge, how could they span the continent all the way to the Pacific?The official title of the case was Hurd et al. v. The Railroad Bridge Company, but it could have been St. Louis v. Chicago, for the transportation future of the whole nation was at stake. Indeed, was it to be dominated by steamboats or by railroads? Conducted at almost the same time as the notorious Dred Scott case, this new trial riveted the nation’s attention. Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln, already well known as one of the best trial lawyers in Illinois, was summoned to Chicago to join a handful of crack legal practitioners in the defense of the bridge. While there, he succesfully helped unite the disparate regions of the country with a truly transcontinental rail system and, in the process, added to the stellar reputation that vaulted him into the White House less than four years later.Re-creating the Effie Afton case from its unlikely inception to its controversial finale, McGinty brilliantly animates this legal cauldron of the late 1850s, which turned out to be the most consequential trial in Lincoln's nearly quarter century as a lawyer. Along the way, the tall prairie lawyer's consummate legal skills and instincts are also brought to vivid life, as is the history of steamboat traffic on the Mississippi, the progress of railroads west of the Appalachians, and the epochal clashes of railroads and steamboats at the river’s edge.Lincoln's Greatest Case is legal history on a grand scale and an essential first act to a pivotal Lincoln drama we did not know was there.

    After months of planning, Ricky Matt and David Sweat cut, chopped, coerced, and connived their way out of a maximum-security prison in the wilderness of upstate New York and managed to elude police for three weeks, sending the region into lockdown and keeping the entire country on edge. The media called it “a bold escape for the ages,” and veteran true-crime writer Michael Benson leads us along the story’s every wild path to dig out a tale of adventure, psychology, sex, and brutality. Escape from Dannemora examines the strange case of Joyce Mitchell, the long-time prison employee who had a sexual relationship with at least one of the killers, and who smuggled them tools and aided in the escape, while they cooked up a plan to kill her husband. In the end, Benson looks closely at conditions at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, NY, a crumbling Gothic pile now under investigation for charges of drug trafficking and brutality.

    Or, rather, didn't appear. They arrived in the dark, their black outlines cloaking them from sight. More importantly, their odd, angular shapes, which made them look like flying origami, rendered them undetectable to Iraq's formidable air defenses. Stealth technology, developed during the decades before Desert Storm, had arrived. To American planners and strategists at the outset of the Cold War, this seemingly ultimate way to gain ascendance over the USSR was only a question. What if the United States could defend its airspace while at the same time send a plane through Soviet skies undetected? A craft with such capacity would have to be essentially invisible to radar - an apparently miraculous feat of physics and engineering. In Stealth, Peter Westwick unveils the process by which the impossible was achieved.At heart, Stealth is a tale of two aerospace companies, Lockheed and Northrop, and their fierce competition - with each other and with themselves - to obtain what was estimated one of the largest procurement contracts in history. Westwick's book fully explores the individual and collective ingenuity and determination required to make these planes and in the process provides a fresh view of the period leading up to the end of the Soviet Union. Taking into account the role of technology, as well as the art and science of physics and engineering, Westwick offers an engaging narrative, one that immerses readers in the race to produce a weapon that some thought might save the world, and which certainly changed it.

    She was in the first class of women to earn pilot’s wings at Vance Air Force Base and was their first female instructor pilot. She was only the second woman admitted to the Air Force’s elite Test Pilot Program at Edwards Air Force Base. NASA had such confidence in her skills as a leader and pilot that she was entrusted to command the first shuttle mission after the Columbia disaster, returning the US to spaceflight after a two-year hiatus. Since retiring from the Air Force and NASA, she has served on numerous corporate boards and is an inspirational speaker about space exploration and leadership.Eileen Collins is among the most recognized and admired women in the world, yet this is the first time she has told her story in a book. It is a story not only of achievement and overcoming obstacles but of profound personal transformation. The shy, quiet child of an alcoholic father and struggling single mother, who grew up in modest circumstances and was an unremarkable student, she had few prospects when she graduated from high school, but she changed her life to pursue her secret dream of becoming an astronaut. She shares her leadership and life lessons throughout the book with the aim of inspiring and passing on her legacy to a new generation.

    story of British Air Force pilot Robert Stanford Tuck.

    With candor and ennobling power, McCain tells a story that, in the words of Newsweek, "makes the other presidential candidates look like pygmies."John McCain learned about life and honor from his grandfather and father, both four-star admirals in the U.S. Navy. This is a memoir about their lives, their heroism, and the ways that sons are shaped and enriched by their fathers. John McCain's grandfather was a gaunt, hawk-faced man known as Slew by his fellow officers and, affectionately, as Popeye by the sailors who served under him. McCain Sr. played the horses, drank bourbon and water, and rolled his own cigarettes with one hand. More significant, he was one of the navy's greatest commanders, and led the strongest aircraft carrier force of the Third Fleet in key battles during World War II. John McCain's father followed a similar path, equally distinguished by heroic service in the navy, as a submarine commander during World War II. McCain Jr. was a slightly built man, but like his father, he earned the respect and affection of his men. He, too, rose to the rank of four-star admiral, making the McCains the first family in American history to achieve that distinction. McCain Jr.'s final assignment was as commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War. It was in the Vietnam War that John McCain III faced the most difficult challenge of his life. A naval aviator, he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and seriously injured. When Vietnamese military officers realized he was the son of a top commander, they offered McCain early release in an effort to embarrass the United States. Acting from a sense of honor taught him by his father and the U.S. Naval Academy, McCain refused the offer. He was tortured, held in solitary confinement, and imprisoned for five and a half years. Faith of My Fathers is about what McCain learned from his grandfather and father, and how their example enabled him to survive those hard years. It is a story of three imperfect men who faced adversity and emerged with their honor intact. Ultimately, Faith of My Fathers shows us, with great feeling and appreciation, what fathers give to their sons, and what endures.

    As the "Oh So Social," it has also been portrayed as a club for the well-connected before, during, and after the war. Donovan's Devils tells the story of a different OSS, that of ordinary soldiers, recruited from among first- and second-generation immigrants, who volunteered for dangerous duty behind enemy lines and risked their lives in Italy, France, the Balkans, and elsewhere in Europe. Organized into Operational Groups, they infiltrated into enemy territory by air or sea and operated for days, weeks, or months hundreds of miles from the closest Allied troops. They performed sabotage, organized native resistance, and rescued downed airmen, nurses, and prisoners of war. Their enemy showed them no mercy, and sometimes their closest friends betrayed them. They were the precursors to today's Special Forces operators.Based on declassified OSS records, personal collections, and oral histories of participants from both sides of the conflict, Donovan's Devils provides the most comprehensive account to date of the Operational Group activities, including a detailed narrative of the ill-fated Ginny mission, which resulted in the one of the OSS's gravest losses of the war.

    In this book, WWII airmen of all ranks candidly speak on all aspects of their experiences--the missions and the planes they flew; their enemies; the places they saw and people they met; their morale, fears, and leadership; and the aerial brotherhood that sustained them.

    The PCs, the i- phones, the i-pods, the tablet PCs all will be a constant reminder of the genuine and witty ways that Steve handled and fondled. He was always lost in a world of his own. He hugged the glory and the downfalls with equal aloofness. Not once were his beliefs shattered. Throughout his life, he struggled and dared to bring his dreams come true. His dreams had a silvery lining of consistency, persuasion and intention. He was unique in every way. The life threatening disease of cancer could not prevent him from working till his last breath, literally. Though stubborn and dominant by nature he stood as a magician in the field of technology. Here is a simple gesture to pay him respect and honour. A magnificent journey presented authentically.

    He was a celebrity during the height of America’s Gilded Age. In this book, you will read about his friendship with Mark Twain, his furious competition with his former employer Thomas Edison, his uneasy relationship with billionaire J.P. Morgan, and his rivalry with Albert Einstein. During his lifetime, Tesla revolutionized the field of electrical engineering with his most famous invention: the induction motor. But that wasn’t all he contributed to the world of technology. His coils, turbines, robotic boats, and mysterious “death ray” continue to beguile the imagination and inspire the inventors of the 21st century. But who was Tesla really? This book will take you from his early childhood in Croatia, where he experienced strange optical visions and “luminous phenomenon” that gave him near super-human powers of memory and visualization, to the “War of the Currents”, Thomas Edison’s bizarre campaign to ruin Tesla’s reputation. From trying to fight the Spanish American War with robots, to electrifying the skies of the Colorado desert, and to starting an earthquake in the middle of New York city, learn how Nikola Tesla shaped the world we live in today.

    Although Wendell Lewis Willkie would lose to FDR, acclaimed biographer David Levering Lewis demonstrates that the corporate chairman–turned–presidential candidate must be regarded as one of the most exciting, intellectually able, and authentically transformational figures to stride the twentieth-century American political landscape.Born in Elwood, Indiana, in 1892, Willkie was certainly one of the most unexpected, if not unlikely, candidates for the presidency, only somewhat less unlikely than Barack Hussein Obama. Although previously marginalized by journalists like Theodore H. White and David Halberstam as a political invention of rich newspaper publishers, the Willkie who emerges here is a man governed by principles who seldom allowed rigid categories to stand in his way. Even as a young man, he quickly distinguished himself as a reform-minded lawyer, whose farm-boy haircut, hayseed manners, and sartorial indifference bespoke common-man straightforwardness but concealed an ambition that propelled him at forty to chairman of Commonwealth and Southern, the country’s third-largest private utility holding company.It was Willkie’s vehement opposition to government regulation of the free-market economy and his success in wrenching a fabulous monetary settlement from the Tennessee Valley Authority that attracted the attention of Republican leaders, who, like Willkie, felt that FDR was turning the office into an imperial presidency. Successful at outwitting the isolationist wing of his own party, Willkie took on Roosevelt during one of the nation’s darkest periods, creating an unlikely alliance of supporters, including anti-big-government business leaders and black voters, who rightly felt excluded from New Deal benefits.Despite receiving the largest percentage of Republican votes in a generation, Willkie lost but, in the process, proposed sweeping civil rights reform a full generation before the civil rights era and a progressive “new conception of the world” that remains inspirational at a time when our own national belief system has become alarmingly immoral and rudderless. Rather than continue a political battle that could have weakened the nation during its darkest hour, a defeated Willkie reconciled with the president and embraced the war effort, while writing One World, a visionary credo that hoped to instigate an international movement for the betterment of the world’s people. In rejecting America’s penchant for exceptionalism, Willkie championed this internationalism more passionately than any American politician before him, creating a sovereign philosophy of liberalism that balanced free enterprise with social responsibility. His untimely death at fifty-two in 1944 left this prophetic vision tragically stillborn.

    But it would take the world some time to believe what had happened: the age of flight had begun, with the first heavier-than-air, powered machine carrying a pilot.Who were these men and how was it that they achieved what they did?David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, tells the surprising, profoundly American story of Wilbur and Orville Wright.Far more than a couple of unschooled Dayton bicycle mechanics who happened to hit on success, they were men of exceptional courage and determination, and of far-ranging intellectual interests and ceaseless curiosity, much of which they attributed to their upbringing. The house they lived in had no electricity or indoor plumbing, but there were books aplenty, supplied mainly by their preacher father, and they never stopped reading.When they worked together, no problem seemed to be insurmountable. Wilbur was unquestionably a genius. Orville had such mechanical ingenuity as few had ever seen. That they had no more than a public high school education, little money and no contacts in high places, never stopped them in their mission to take to the air. Nothing did, not even the self-evident reality that every time they took off in one of their contrivances, they risked being killed.In this thrilling book, master historian David McCullough draws on the immense riches of the Wright Papers, including private diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, and more than a thousand letters from private family correspondence to tell the human side of the Wright Brothers' story, including the little-known contributions of their sister, Katharine, without whom things might well have gone differently for them.

    In my younger years I avoided that subject, be it in literature or in entertainment, whenever I possibly could. That was not easy. Television was full of programs in which Germans looked stupid and heinous. My own children watched these things with glee; I fled into another room. Since I have always read a lot, I was at least aware of the avalanche of books that were published about the Holocaust. Still, I kept my blinkers on. I firmly told myself that it was not my business, since I was just a child during that time. Sooner or later such an attitude will have to come to an end. It did for me after I fled a difficult marriage and finally began to examine my life. This was a slow process, aided by a patient psychiatrist. Now, years later, I want to write about my life and about the conflicted feelings such a search will cause in a woman of German nationality.

    They miraculously survived two years in the woods—through brutal winters, Typhus outbreaks, and merciless Nazi raids—until they were liberated by the Red Army in 1944. After the war they trekked across the Alps into Italy where they settled as refugees before eventually immigrating to the United States.During the first ghetto massacre, Miriam Rabinowitz rescued a young boy named Philip by pretending he was her son. Nearly a decade later, a chance encounter at a wedding in Brooklyn would lead Philip to find the woman who saved him. And to discover her daughter Ruth was the love of his life.From a little-known chapter of Holocaust history, one family’s inspiring true story.