cover of Nemesis

Nemesis: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia by Robert J. Donovan

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle for Amazon device.


As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and does not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to  an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file  in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

A Review from The New York Times

“Readable and at times even exciting” —The New York Times

Presidents Embattled by Drew Middleton, The New York Times, November 4, 1984
(Drew Middleton was the military correspondent of The New York Times.)

NEMESIS: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia. By Robert J. Donovan. Illustrated. 216 pp.

Robert J. Donovan tackled an awesome task in this analysis of two American Presidents’ actions and reactions to two of the most agonizing political-military crises ever to beset the Republic. The result is a closely reasoned, well-researched commentary on troubles that convulsed the United States for a quarter of a century.

Mr. Donovan has presented in alternate sections descriptions of the military and political events that cost more than 100,000 American lives and dominated American politics. The reader is asked to move from the Yalu River to the councils of the Democratic Party leadership, and from the jungles of South Vietnam to the groves of academe where opposition to the fighting in those jungles flourished. Mr. Donovan’s success in making the book readable and at times even exciting is a tribute to his skill. Inevitably longer, more detailed comparative analyses of these situations will be published one day. But until they appear, ”Nemesis” should serve as a standard.

Two themes run through it. The first is that neither Truman’s Administration nor Johnson’s anticipated the endless complications, domestic and foreign, that would arise from the deployment of United States forces on the Asian mainland. Governments, democratic or otherwise, seldom do understand the consequences of such actions.

The second theme, which I wish Mr. Donovan had explored more fully, is the impact of recent history on policy making. The decisions about Korea by President Truman and his cabinet were affected strongly by what today would be called the Munich syndrome – a bitter memory of the surrender by Great Britain and France to Hitler’s demands at the Munich meeting of 1938. Ironically, the capitulation at Munich was partly inspired by British and French leaders’ memories of the millions of their compatriots who were killed or wounded during World War I. But Truman saw any failure to respond to the North Koreans’ attack on South Korea in 1950 as another Munich.

That attitude continued to affect Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson in the form of the ”domino theory” when they considered what to do about the slow disintegration of Vietnam after the French were defeated there in the 1950’s. They believed that the loss of South Vietnam would lead to the falling of other ”dominoes” in Asia. And the result is that the United States now suffers in the conduct of international affairs from the inhibiting influence of our loss in Vietnam.

Mr. Donovan, a seasoned reporter on politics who has written a highly praised two-volume biography of Truman, excels in recounting the criticism that fell on Truman and Johnson during their war years. Still vivid in public memory is the wave of criticism of Johnson, the Vietnam War and, in many cases, the entire American political and social system that broke over the White House in the 1960’s. But many will have forgotten the storm of abuse that burst on the White House after the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur from his command in Korea, abuse that included demands for Truman’s impeachment.

Mr. Donovan pays perhaps too much attention to the political ramifications of the two wars and, in my view, not enough to the military events and decisions that aroused these political responses. For instance, I would have welcomed a more thorough examination of the refusal by the White House to recognize that North Vietnam and not the Viet Cong was the enemy in the Vietnam War, and to consider plans for early attacks on Haiphong and Hanoi. One reason heard at the time was that such bombing would invite intervention by China. But at the time China was caught up in the opening of the Cultural Revolution and many experts believe it would have been unable to intervene effectively.

Mr. Donovan’s discussion of the later American air attacks on North Vietnam is balanced and makes the point, too often dismissed at the time, that in that predominantly agricultural economy there was really nothing much to bomb save key communications. North Vietnam wasn’t Germany.
Effective surprise by the enemies marred the American military performance in both wars and these surprises had a great impact on American politics. The Chinese attack on MacArthur’s forces in North Korea led to a major American military defeat – all the more grievous for public opinion in this country because it closely followed the successful American landings at Inchon harbor in North Korea. About 300,000 Chinese fell on the American and South Korean forces and MacArthur, who had been talking about getting the boys home by Christmas, faced what he called an entirely new war.

POLITICALLY, the Tet offensive in 1968 was the turning point of the Vietnam War, as Mr. Donovan illustrates. Although, as we now know, eventually both the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were defeated with heavy casualties in this offensive, the raid on the United States Embassy in Saigon gave the impression that the United States was losing the war in military terms.

Truman emerges from these pages as by far the more balanced and effective war leader – one who, of course, knew something of war at first hand. Johnson, on the contrary, seems volatile and uncertain, a consummate politician who in the end failed to understand the impact of war on politics.

Cover of Walter Reuther biography

Walter Reuther by Fred J. Cook

The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.

As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.

If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.

Download mobi file here.

When Walter Reuther spoke for labor, he spoke from a background of two generations in social reform and the labor movement, for his father and grandfather were leaders before him. As a boy, Walter grew up among the factories and mines of Wheeling, West Virginia. He became a diemaker and in 1927 went to Detroit, the Motor City. There the forces were beginning to work that were to create in the 1930’s the United Auto Workers and the Con­gress of Industrial Organizations. Walter became an excellent tool and die maker. He and his brother Victor educated themselves to become labor lead­ers, first in Detroit, and then on a round-the-world tour. They worked in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and saw firsthand how Communism repressed the workers. The brothers felt the weight of Nazism and Fascism in Germany and Italy.

Back in Detroit, Walter Reuther found the auto workers’ demand for a union increasing because of the effects of the Depression. Unemployment, wage cuts, and tighter and tighter control of the workers’ lives led to sit-down strikes, riots, bloodshed, mar­tial law, and the ultimate capitulation of the Big Three, General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, to the forces of the Union.

World. War II brought a new era of responsibility to labor leadership. Successively Reuther rose to head the UAW and the CIO. In the 1950’s, he helped merge the twin giants of the American labor movement, the older American Federation of Labor and the CIO. He worked to fight rising prices and for full employment.

Though assassins’ bullets twice endangered his life, he continued to work hard building the house of labor until his death in a plane crash in 1970.

Debs Speaking to a Crowd

Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid by McAlister Coleman

To download an epub file for your Android tablet or Chromebook or Apple device, click below:


To download a mobi file for your Amazon device, click below:

From a Review by H.L. Mencken in the American Mercury, August 1930.

“Mr. Coleman has told his story very well.”

MR. COLEMAN’S sub-title may seem a bit pretentious, but the record bears it out. Debs was one of those fanatics who are simply unacquainted with the meaning of fear. At a time when practically all of the other Socialists of America were running ignominiously for cover he stood his ground magnificently and went to jail without a quaver. He would have gone to the gallows, I believe, in the same serene and unperturbed manner. Perhaps it is something of a slander to call him a Socialist at all. He died without knowing more than the A B C of Marxism, and had relatively little to do with its chief prophets. The shabbiness of spirit that is their chief mark, at least on this side of the water, was not in him. An ignorant man, and, in more than one way, a childishly silly man, he yet managed to show a singular fineness of character.
Someday, I suppose, his admirers will be comparing him to Lincoln, as Lincoln is compared to Jesus. The likeness is faulty in each case. Lincoln was a far shrewder and more politic fellow than Jesus, and Debs was far braver and more forthright than Lincoln. In old Abe, in fact, the cross-roads politician was always visible. He never did anything without figuring out its consequences to five places of decimals, and when those consequences promised to damage his private fortunes he usually found a good reason to refrain. But Debs banged through life without caring a damn, innocent and cocksure. He got into trouble very often, but I can find no evidence that he was ever bothered by doubts.
If common decency ever gets any credit in America, and the schoolbooks are revised accordingly, there will be a chapter in them on the great encounter between Debs and Woodrow Wilson. They never met face to face, for Wilson was in the White House and Debs was in prison; nevertheless, their souls came together, and it was old Gene’s that won hands down.
The conflict between them had been fought out in the world many times before, but never by two such perfect champions. On the side of Wilson were power, eminence, learning, glory, a vast forensic skill, a haughty manner, and the almost unanimous support of the American press and people; on the side of Debs there was only the dignity of an honest and honorable man. Debs remained behind the bars, but Wilson danced naked before the world, exposed to posterity as the abject and pathetic bounder that he was. It was his tragedy that he was not only quite unable to achieve decency himself, but also quite unable to recognize it in other men. When he died Harding turned Debs loose, with a gesture both generous and charming. Thus it remained for a boozy Elk out of the Jimson weed country to teach manners to a Princeton Presbyterian….
The whole labor movement in the United States is in the hands of sleek, oily gentlemen who have learned that it is far more comfortable to make terms with the bosses than to fight them. These gentlemen, as I have said, are well fed and well tailored, and have no sympathy with dreamers. Presently they will be collecting money for a monument to old Sam Gompers. But they will never propose a monument to Debs. • In the long run, however, he will probably be recalled, at all events by romantics. There was genuinely heroic blood in him, though he sacrificed himself to a chimera. Mr. Coleman has told his story very well.

Patrick Henry: Firebrand of the Revolution by Nardi Campion, Reading Level is 5.6

To read this ebook on a computer or tablet using Google Play Books, or iBooks on your iPad, download this epub format.

To read on a device from Amazon, here is the ebook in mobi format.

Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.

“Firebrand” is an engaging biography of a pivotal figure in America’s fight for independence.

A reviewer from Goodreads writes “This is an older biography of Patrick Henry (1961), with target audience of middle school/junior high. Overall, this was a really excellent read, with plenty of details about Henry’s life and career, but not too overwhelming. It’s written to engage younger readers, so there is some dialogue and little anecdotes along the way, but most of these stories added to the character development of Henry, helping us to see what shaped him throughout his younger years and even as an adult.”

Jenner vaccinating a boy

Edward Jenner and Smallpox Vaccination by Irmengarde Eberle

His Discoveries Saved Millions of Lives

To read this ebook on a computer using Google Play Books, or iBooks on your tablet or iPad, download this epub format.

To download a mobi file for your Amazon device, click below.

Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.

With Calibre, you and your students can read this ebook in epub format on computer screens. By changing the background color, and enlarging the font, the reading experience on a computer screen is reasonable. On Chromebooks, you will need to use Google Play Books. Calibre is not available for Chromebooks.

 

 

Image of Joseph Lister

Master Surgeon–A Biography of Joseph Lister by Lawrence Farmer

Download an epub file for your Android or Apple device:


Download a mobi file for your Amazon device:

It has been said that there are only two periods in the history of surgery: before Lister and after Lister. In this full-length biography, Laurence Farmer tells the fascinating story of the brilliant, dedicated man who developed the revolutionary concept of antiseptic surgery.

The reader is given a vivid picture of the deplorable hospital conditions of the mid-nineteenth century, and the strong resistance to change that existed even among the most distinguished medical men of the day. Against this background, Joseph Lister’s long struggle to prove his theories about hospital infection and to achieve their acceptance by his colleagues stands out in dramatic relief.

Although the majority of the book is devoted to Lister’s career as a surgeon and researcher, there are many interesting details of his Quaker family background, his education, and his unusually happy marriage. Lister emerges not only as a great scientist, but as a human being of dignity, strength, and tenderness.

Grade Level is 10.8 using the Flesch-Kincaid readability test with three sample chapters.

The Curies and Radium by Elizabeth Rubin

Grade Level on the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale is 6.4. Download an epub version for your Android tablet or phone:

Download a mobi file for your Kindle device: PIERRE and MARIE CURIE are perhaps the most remarkable husband-and-wife team in the history of science. Together they set out to isolate the mysterious radioactive substance in the masses of pitchblende ore available to them in the old shed that was their laboratory. It was back-breaking work, but Marie and Pierre kept at it. Finally, they obtained a product whose radiation was four hundred times greater than that of uranium! Marie called the new element Polonium, after her beloved native Poland. Later, they isolated their famous element radium — nine hundred times as active as uranium! Pierre’s brilliant career was cut short by his tragic death in 1906, but Marie went on with their courageous work alone. In 1911, she received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of radium. True, it was Marie’s long exposure to radium and X-rays that caused her death. But out of her death came life, for radium is one of modern medicine’s greatest life-savers. The basic idealism and determination of the Curies are captured for budding scientists to ponder. Scientific language is suitable for young readers.

Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.

With Calibre, you and your students can read this ebook in epub format on computer screens. By changing the background color, and enlarging the font, the reading experience on a computer screen is reasonable.

 

Pioneers of Freedom by McAlister Coleman

Download an epub file for your Android or Apple tablet, or Chromebook.

Download a Kindle file for your Amazon device.

In simple, vigorous fashion, and in a style so clear that it can be read with pleasure by high school students, Mr. Coleman tells the stories of nine men and one woman whom he has chosen as the outstanding leaders of the forces of democracy in America. Some of them are known to every schoolboy, a few of them have almost been forgotten, but all of them again glow with life in these vivid pages.

Here they are — Jefferson, Paine, Wendell Phillips, ‘Gene Debs and the rest—leaders of American democracy. Unforgettable portraits of great men who have pointed the way to a new America.

Cover with Image of Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday: From Errand Boy to Master Physicist by Harry Sootin

To read this ebook on a computer or tablet using Google Play Books, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.

To read on a device from Amazon, here is the ebook in mobi format.

Directions on how to email this file to your Kindle device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .

The life story of one of the leading scientists of the last century whose experiments led to the development of the dynamo, the electric motor, and to an industrial revolution.

Michael Faraday, son of a blacksmith, was appren­ticed at fourteen to a bookbinder in whose shop he gained most of his education and acquired an interest in science—from the Encyclopedia Britannica. That interest changed and dominated his entire life, and led from errand boy to Fellow of the Royal Society.

Faraday attracted the attention of Sir Humphry Davy, a Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institu­tion, who hired the boy as a laboratory assistant. Fara­day worked with the professor on chemical research for a number of years. He discovered benzene, butylene and the acids of naphthalene, but he never lost interest in electricity and conducted thousands of ex­periments in an effort to turn electrical energy into mechanical motion. Fie invented the first primitive dynamo and equally primitive motor, and made the first generator.

For forty years Faraday lived and worked in his rooms and laboratory at the Royal Institution. When Queen Victoria learned that he and his wife were finding it difficult to climb the stairs to their attic rooms, she presented him with one of the houses in Hampton Green Court.

Faraday was a simple man, proud and sensitive. He loved his work and refused many commercial offers that would have made him a fortune. He also refused a knighthood from a grateful country to whom he brought honor and glory as its leading scientist. Fie did. through the help and urging of his friends, accept a Fellowship in the Royal Society, and he finally ac­cepted a pension, though this precipitated the kind of publicity he had sought so hard to avoid all his life.

Today his laws of electrolysis are part of every mod­ern textbook in chemistry and physics, and the unit of electric capacity, the Farad, was named for him.

Book Cover with the Image of Dr. Salk

The Polio Man: The Story of Dr. Jonas Salk by John Rowland

Download the epub version for your Android or Apple device:

Download the mobi version for your Amazon device:

“Absorbing book . . . Young teenagers who read it will come away with a profound respect for the modest doctor.”—Kansas City Star

“Inspiring biography . . . conveys to the reader the personal rewards of a life devoted to science.”—Booklist

“Includes good background history of early-polio epidemics, theories, and work still in progress . . . approach is authoritative and objective.”—Library Journal

“He read everything he could lay his hand on,” a teacher of young Jonas recalled—and indeed Dr. Salk’s interest in great medical problems goes back to his student days in New York City. Even then he was fascinated by the mysterious virus and its role ill infantile paralysis.

On April 12, 1955, it was announced to the world that Dr. Jonas Salk had successfully tested a polio vaccine. A true man of Science, Dr. Salk had not minded the long hours of hard work in the laboratory which led to that exciting day, because he believed in the importance of his goal. By 1956 over 50 million people had been vaccinated and Dr. Salk’s fame had spread everywhere— to England, Poland, Hungary, Israel.

Dr. Salk is a great scientist but he is also a great humanitarian and fame has not lessened by his desire to serve mankind and carry on his struggle against disease. Readers who have yet to choose their life’s goal will find Dr. Salk’s story a challenge and an inspiration.