Glorious Failures, Volume 1 is an engaging collection of the most famous and infamous almost-summits. Each of these early attempts often rival the first successful ascent in fame and notoriety. The story of the 1956 American expedition to K2, which came tantalizingly close to the summit only to be forced back by illness and weather, is told in fascinating detail by Jim Curran.

Designing and making cars is an expensive thing to do. So is racing them. All told, the car business spends billions every year and with such vast sums at stake you’d think the people involved wouldn’t give desk space to Captain Cockup. Sadly, you would be wrong. Every department in every car firm and motorsport operation is capable of complete and abject failure, and on a surprisingly regular basis. Which is what this book is about. You see, Top Gear knows a thing or two about embarrassing mistakes, as anyone who watched our India special will know. The truth is, for many years Top Gear has also regarded failure as funny. Where other television programmes edit out the moment where the presenter falls over or slams their hand in a door, Top Gear gleefully leaves it in. So who better to take you on a gentle canter through 50 of the car world’s biggest and most glorious failures? That’s right, it’s Top Gear. Who else did you think? If you want this sort of stuff from Countryfile you might be in for a wait.

From award-winning biographer Patrick McGilligan comes an eye-opening life of the troubled filmmaker behind Rebel Without a Cause Nicholas Ray spent the glory years of his career creating films that were dark, emotionally charged, and haunted by social misfits and bruised young people consumed by private anguish—from his career-defining debut, They Live by Night (1948), to his enduring masterwork, Rebel Without a Cause (1955); from the noir thriller In a Lonely Place (1950), pairing his second wife, the blond bombshell Gloria Grahame, with Humphrey Bogart, to cult pictures like Johnny Guitar (1954) and Bigger Than Life (1956). Yet his work on-screen is more than matched by the passions and struggles of his personal story—one of the most dramatic lives of any major Hollywood filmmaker. In Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, Patrick McGilligan offers a revelatory biography of Ray, a man whose troubled life was marked by creative peaks and valleys alike. As a young man, Ray personified the rambling spirit of twentieth-century America, learning from luminaries like Thornton Wilder and Frank Lloyd Wright; mingling with future legends like Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, and John Houseman; and carousing with musicians like Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. Notoriously self-destructive but irresistibly alluring—to men and women alike—Ray empathized with the broken and misunderstood, a talent that allowed him to create characters of true complexity on-screen. His youthful association with radical politics nearly killed his nascent film career—until a secret agreement to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities saved him. His tumultuous second marriage, to Grahame, was shattered after Ray found her in bed with his teenage son from his first marriage. He romanced stars and starlets, including Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Joan Crawford, and the teenage Natalie Wood, but never enjoyed a stable home life. The triumph of Rebel Without a Cause, his masterpiece of teenage angst, led to a burgeoning partnership with James Dean, but Dean’s untimely death devastated the filmmaker, who fell into a spiral of drinking and drug addiction. Less than a decade later, Ray’s career was effectively over . . . until the adoration of European critics, and a frantic last-ditch burst of creativity, nearly restored him to glory before his tragic early death in 1979. Meticulously detailed and compulsively readable, this new biography reconstructs the tortuous journey of one of the most enduringly fascinating figures in American film.

Alain Badiou has claimed that Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude (Bloomsbury, 2008) “opened up a new path in the history of philosophy.” And so, whether you agree or disagree with the speculative realism movement, it has to be addressed. Lacanian Realism does just that. This book reconstructs Lacanian dogma from the ground up: first, by unearthing a new reading of the Lacanian category of the real; second, by demonstrating the political and cultural ingenuity of Lacan's concept of the real, and by positioning this against the more reductive analyses of the concept by Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Saul Newman, Todd May, Joan Copjec, Jacques Rancière, and others, and; third, by arguing that the subject exists intimately within the real. Lacanian Realism is an imaginative and timely exploration of the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary continental philosophy.

Biography of William H. Pickering, 1910-2004 On the first day of February 1958, three men held aloft a model of Explorer 1, America's first Earth satellite, for the press photographers. That image of William Pickering, Wernher von Braun, and James Van Allen became an icon for America's response to the Sputnik challenge. Von Braun and Van Allen were well known, but who was Pickering? From humble beginnings in a remote country town in New Zealand, Pickering came to California in 1928 and quickly established himself as an outstanding student at the then-new California Institute of Technology (Caltech). At Caltech, Pickering worked under the famous physicist Robert Millikan on cosmic-ray experiments, at that time a relatively new field of physics. In 1944, when Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was developing rocket propulsion systems for the U.S. Army, Pickering joined the work-force as a technical manager. He quickly established himself as an outstanding leader, and 10 years later, Caltech named him Director of JPL. And then, suddenly, the world changed. In October 1957, the Sputnik satellite startled the world with its spectacular demonstration of Soviet supremacy in space. Pickering led an intense JPL effort that joined with the von Braun and Van Allen teams to answer the Soviet challenge. Eighty-three days later, on 31 January 1958, America's first satellite roared into Earth orbit. A few months after that, Pickering's decision to affiliate JPL with the newly formed National Aeronautics and Space Administration set the basis for his subsequent career and the future of NASA's ambitious program for the exploration of the solar system. In the early days of the space program, failure followed failure as Pickering and his JPL team slowly ascended the learning curve. Eventually, however, NASA and JPL resolve paid off. First the Moon, then Venus, and then Mars yielded their scientific mysteries to JPL spacecraft of ever-increasing sophistication. Within its first decade, JPL-built spacecraft sent back the first close-up photographs of the lunar surface, while others journeyed far beyond the Moon to examine Venus and return the first close-up views of the surface of Mars. Later, even more complex space missions made successful soft-landings on the Moon and on Mars. Pickering's sudden death in March 2004 at the age of 93 was widely reported in the U.S. and overseas. As one NASA official eulogized him, His pioneering work formed the foundation upon which the current program for exploring our solar system was built. On this, the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Space Age, it is proper to remind ourselves of the ordinary people who met the extraordinary challenge to make it happen. (most of this is from the left inside flap of the dust jacket) r

This short volume is a plea for Christians to rethink their point and purpose in light of larger cultural changes and a crisis in leadership. Foss's model of moving from issues into conversation and then into compassion is a blueprint for new leadership.

Presents what philosophical ethics can be like if freed from the idealizing and reductive pressures of conventional moral theory, making the case that moral imagination is a key part of human virtue by showing the variety of roles it plays in our practical and evaluative lives.

This is Volume I of eight of a series on Wittgenstein. Originally published in 1966, this is a collection of essays that review and comment on the form, language, Picture Theory in Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’.

This first volume in the series traces the development of philosophy over two-and-a-half centuries, from Thales at the beginning of the sixth century BC to the death of Plato in 347 BC.