Grand Adventure Research Articles

Scalar Electromagnetic Energy, Making STAR TREK Physics Real

Back in 1997, I first heard about energy researcher, Tom Bearden on the Art Bell show, “Coast to Coast AM.” Tom spoke about Free Energy and Anti-gravity. He also spoke about an upcoming conference featuring him lecturing about this incredible topic. What is Free Energy and Anti-gravity I thought? Everyone heard of or perhaps seen a UFO flying about in our skies above? But how does this amazing technology work? So, without question, I had to go to this conference. I booked a flight, made my hotel and car reservations and off I went on this grand adventure not knowing where this was going to lead? Art Bell frequently mentioned on his late-night radio show, “You want to take a ride?”

The Nobel Mabel. The woman who discovered that low oxygen stimulates hemoglobin production.

The research of Mabel Purefoy FitzGerald (1872-1973) was recently recognized by Sir Peter Ratcliffe in his public lecture at the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine as a critical step in the recent delineation of the oxygen sensing pathway. This brief article offers a tantalizing glimpse into the life of a woman whose scientific career spanned four countries, worked with eminent scientists and clinicians including Haldane and Osler, and published important physiologic discoveries. Her accomplishments and astounding life were lost to history for more than one hundred years and it is time to bring her back. When this diminutive and proper English woman set out on her own to the wild and remote mining towns of Colorado, little did she know that this would be the moment for which she would be remembered in her long, productive research career and ludicrous struggle to become a physician more than a century ago. Hers is an extraordinary tale of privilege, hardship, discrimination, shocking perseverance, and grand adventure.

Sea of Cortez: Recollections and Reflections

Sea of Cortez: Recollections and Reflections Richard Astro (bio) It began very inauspiciously. I was grading freshman composition essays in my office in the Oregon State University English Department, a long day’s work punctuated by periodic frustrations over the quality (or rather the lack of it) in this or that student’s writing. As I was reading a particularly disturbing essay about the pollution of the Willamette River (the author saw no problem with a nearby zirconium plant using the river to dispose of its toxic waste) I looked up to see an older man with a very strange visage standing in my doorway; most certainly he was not one of my students. There were no introductions—he simply stood there, looking down at me. Feeling slightly uncomfortable, I asked if I could help him; no response. Finally, he stepped forward and asked quizzically, “Are you the fellow who wrote a doctoral dissertation on John Steinbeck?” “Yes,” I responded in a halting voice, adding that it had been accepted only two or three months ago. Again, no response. Moments later, scratching his chin, he asked if, in my manuscript, I had talked about Steinbeck’s interest in marine ecology. “Yes, well sort of,” I responded, qualifying my response by substituting the word biology for ecology. Appearing somewhat displeased, he stood another moment and then came into the office and sat down. “We have much to talk about,” he said. “What’s that,” I answered. “If your dissertation is any good at all, I can help you turn it into an important book,” he quipped offhandedly. Pausing, he then asked, “Is it any good?” I smiled and tried to nod. I must admit, though, strange as this encounter seemed, my interest piqued. “Okay,” I said, mustering the courage to deal with my visitor, “let’s begin at the beginning…who are you?” “Hedgpeth,” he responded, “Joel Hedgpeth, I run the university’s Marine Science Center in Newport. I knew Ed Ricketts well. I knew Steinbeck. I know lots of people who knew them both. I said we have [End Page 496] much to talk about.” “Yes, it well may be,” I concurred, somewhat hesitatingly—not sure I heard him correctly or, if I did, trusted what I was hearing. “I’ll come over to your house later this afternoon,” he said. “I live in Newport and can stay here in Corvallis a couple of extra hours. What’s your address?” I told him. He left, and I read a half-dozen more student essays before going home. I wasn’t at all sure he’d show up. I got home about 4:30, about a half hour before my wife, Betty, who directed the graduate program in the College of Business at Oregon State. As I began telling her about my visit from Hedgpeth, there was a knock on the door. Closer to it than me, she opened it and there he stood. Smiling, she invited him in. Once inside, he turned toward both of us, inquiring what was for dinner. Nonplussed, I don’t recall that we answered. There was no need. It came from him: “a nice steak, burned…a salad, no carrots.” One of us went off to Albertson’s supermarket. The other poured Joel a tall scotch—on the rocks—and then another. What would become a grand adventure was underway. When I began my doctoral work at the University of Washington, our department chair, the noted Shakespeare scholar Robert Heilman—a giant in the academic literary world at the time—gave me and all of his new students a volume written by Richard Altick titled The Scholar Adventurers. He said we should read it carefully, internalize Altick’s discussion about the excitement of literary research so that we might prosper not only as graduate students but as scholars, whatever our fields of specialization. I stayed up much of the night reading, and my immediate takeaway was that I could become a real sleuth, uncovering all kinds of buried secrets about writers and their work that would validate my choice of career, and, if I were fortunate, would convince my slightly skeptical in-laws that I...

Wrong Way Summer by Heidi Lang

Reviewed by: Wrong Way Summer by Heidi Lang Kiri Palm Lang, Heidi Wrong Way Summer. Amulet/Abrams, 2020 [288p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-3693-3 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-68335-640-0 $15.29 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 4-8 Twelve-year-old Claire Jacobus wishes her dad would tell her the truth: about why her mom left them, why he can’t find a job, and why he’s suddenly decided to sell their house and move the whole family into a van. Dad Scottie is a storyteller at heart, though, and it’s not long before he and Claire’s eight-year-old brother Patrick are swept up in “hashtag vanlife.” This middle grade novel blends Claire’s fact with her father’s fantasies as the narrative shifts from the Jacobuses’ vehicular misadventures to the historical fairy tale of their cowboy ancestor, “Wrong Way” Jacobus. Lang (Dash of Dragon, BCCB 7/17; A Hint of Hydra, BCCB 6/18) paints an accurate and sympathetic portrait of “houselessness,” with Claire bemoaning the lack of showers and safe, legal places to park overnight while eventually coming to love the experience and growing closer with her family. As the family travels, Claire slowly puts together the splinters of fact among her father’s fiction, and the author does a masterful job of guiding the reader through her discoveries, her prose authentic to the mind of a preteen and the clues never heavy handed. This subtle road trip story evades clichés while working within tropes, and Lang leaves her reader with optimism but no easy solutions; Scottie is still looking for a new job and the family has a lot of growing to do. It’s still clear that the Grand Adventure of the Jacobuses’ summer has had a profound and healing effect, and readers will join Claire in looking forward to the future. [End Page 401] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Grand Adventure: The Lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and Their Discovery of a Viking Settlement in North America

<i>A Grand Adventure: The Lives of Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad and Their Discovery of a Viking Settlement in North America</i>

Grand Adventure of Augmented Reality in Landscape of Surgery.

Computer as an integral part of continual advancements in medicine has experienced tremendous development to minimize the risks and improving the precision of the surgery. Our review included multi-disciplinary publications in English from 2014 to 2017 using Springer, Oxford library, Elsevier, PubMed, Google Scholar, and Springer search engines using terms of “augmented reality (AR), “plastic surgery,” and “surgery “ and “Augmented Reality Ethics and challenges”. It was shown that AR has been successfully effective in different branches of surgery, but with concerns and challenges like acceptance, privacy, different physical, security and behavioral threats. To come over them partially, a methodological approach for cyber threat landscape proactive exploration has been suggested.

Understanding financialization: standing on the shoulders of Minsky

AbstractSince Hyman Minsky’s death in 1996, much has been written about financialization. This article — by means of the synthesis, interpretation, and assessment of an extensive literature — explores the issues that Minsky examined in the last decade of his life and considers their relationship to the financialization literature. At the heart of those issues is what Minsky called money manager capitalism, which he viewed through the lens of a theory of capitalist development inherited from Joseph Schumpeter. Advancing our understanding of the history of financial economics, the article shows how Minsky contributed to — indeed, anticipated much of — the study of financialization. The article also identifies two sources of Minsky’s insightfulness: his treatment of economics as a grand adventure, and his willingness to step beyond the world of theory and interact with the world of practice. Today, scholars with a Minsky perspective face formidable challenges, but, the author concludes, within Minsky’s writings is also a glimmer of hope: Economic systems are not natural systems; we can reshape them to achieve a more humane world.

Understanding Financialization: Standing on the Shoulders of Minsky

Since the death of Hyman Minsky in 1996, much has been written about financialization. This paper explores the issues that Minsky examined in the last decade of his life and considers their relationship to that financialization literature. Part I addresses Minsky’s penetrating observations regarding what he called money manager capitalism. Part II outlines the powerful analytical framework that Minsky used to organize his thinking and that we can use to extend his work. Part III shows how Minsky’s observations and framework represent a major contribution to the study of financialization. Part IV highlights two keys to Minsky’s success: his treatment of economics as a grand adventure and his willingness to step beyond the world of theory. Part V concludes by providing a short recap, acknowledging formidable challenges facing scholars with a Minsky perspective, and calling attention to the glimmer of hope that offers a way forward.

Men without Women by Philip Gabriel &amp; Ted Goossen

author with whom he greatly identifies; he remembers a woman he met in a different city whose address is the only tangible thing he knows about her anymore; he reflects on the attic room he stayed in during his university days in which he read passionate poetry. Bae’s greatest strength as a writer lies in her ability to take what at first appear to be disjointed images and scenes and weave them together into one beautiful story. The attic room, the poetry, the woman on the platform he longs to kiss are all connected in her character’s mind with a meditation on time and space: “When was it that he had last kissed a woman so ardently, his lips as passionate as when they pronounced poetry? In that city or this, at the house of his acquaintance or on the platform in the north station, while waiting for the train.” The entire collection is as riveting and poetic as the title story: an author recalls several visits to her mentor; a young man is reconnected with a former lover while struggling with questions about his sexuality ; a playwright experiments with how to portray time on the stage. These stories are a great place to start for those looking to get a taste of Bae’s innovative style. For those already familiar with her previous novels, it is exciting to once again encounter more of the author’s intriguing and thought-provoking prose. Melissa Beck Woodstock Academy, Connecticut Haruki Murakami. Men without Women. Trans. Philip Gabriel & Ted Goossen. New York. Knopf. 2017. 227 pages. Men without Women comprises seven short stories, four of which have appeared in other publications. All display elements of Haruki Murakami’s fiction that readers have come to expect: magical realism, the Beatles, cats and jazz, and abrupt endings without easy resolution. We come to realize this last element is entirely appropriate precisely because there is no pat answer, no comfortable place, no way to tie up loose ends for the protagonists of these tales who, as the title notes, are missing an important woman. The parameters of this lack differ, of course, and the degree to which we can sympathize will likewise vary, but the emotional complications of that lack are something most readers will understand and appreciate at a visceral level, even if the tale seems beyond comfortable comprehension. Three of the stories are particularly effective. “Samsa in Love” is a playful reversal of Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” Here, Gregor the cockroach wakes up to find he is human, and his first interaction is with a hunchbacked woman who is convinced he is slow and only interested in her for kinky sex. Like Gregor, we know nothing but the realities of the moment. “Scheherazade” is the most unsettling work in the collection. Here, Murakami is at his best, probing the seemingly unfathomable reasons for connection while asking of the reader a degree of indulgence and understanding of what it means to be needy and the lengths one might go to satisfy those desires. Finally, “Kino” raises far more narrative questions than it answers before sinking almost languidly into a surrealistic pool of self-questioning that also appears to offer an answer only to pull it away at the last moment. This instability powerfully conveys the force of the protagonist’s loss. Despite the generally engaging nature of these seven vignettes, however, it was with some disappointment that I put the book down, for I could not help feeling that Murakami had been unable to go beyond his previous work. The specific contexts are new, and a different problem is the focus, but the stories feel overly familiar, as if we have read them before. Die-hard Murakami fans will welcome them, and readers new to Murakami will discover Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès Island of Point Nemo Trans. Hannah Chute Open Letter In Island of Point Nemo, Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès constructs a novel of grand adventure that weaves together two narratives: one that takes readers on a murder-mystery romp across the globe and another situated in an absurd e-reader factory. Translated from the French, the novel’s...

Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters by Frye Gaillard (review)

Reviewed by: Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters by Frye Gaillard Mike Bunn Journey to the Wilderness: War, Memory, and a Southern Family’s Civil War Letters. By Frye Gaillard. Montgomery: NewSouth Books, 2015. 128 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 9781588383129. If there is any genre of book that seems to consistently fall short of its potential in American historiography, it is the published collection of Civil War letters. We seem to have thousands of these volumes floating [End Page 370] about, each loaded with buried nuggets of golden quotes surrounded by layers of tedious recounting of the monotony of camp life in bad grammar, all introduced by authors with rather formulaic overviews of the progression of the Civil War. While these books have their place as reference resources regardless of their eloquence and have certainly been invaluable to generations of historians in understanding the conflict through the eyes of the men who fought it, as narratives they usually leave much to be desired. Frye Gaillard’s provocative and refreshingly brief book, Journey to the Wilderness, happily rises above that stereotype. It is an enlightening and readable chronological story focusing on one family’s experience during and memory of one of our nation’s defining events. Gaillard’s success in weaving fragmented correspondence and memories together into a compelling narrative should come as no surprise, as he is currently Writer-in-Residence at the University of South Alabama and author of nearly two dozen acclaimed books, including Cradle of Freedom: Alabama and the Movement that Changed America (Tuscaloosa, 2004) and The Books That Mattered: A Reader’s Memoir (Montgomery, 2012). While this is his first foray into Civil War history specifically, he has a wealth of experience in writing about the cultural heritage of the South in general. He is ably assisted in the undertaking via a superb foreword by colleague Steven Trout, director of the Center for the Study of War and Memory at USA, which sets the tone for the book by asking how the grisly reality of the war could have so long been downplayed in place of more romantic remembrances. Gaillard features a carefully selected and closely edited batch of his family’s correspondence in the book which he combines with his own lucid commentary, providing both historical context and background on the way the experiences of the writers were collectively remembered by their descendants. In the letters he finds many of the usual expressions of initial optimism for the war as some sort of grand adventure fade into a grim determination to survive its horrors; evidence of both the thrill of participation in epoch–defining events and the drudgery of camp life; attempts to deal with separation from loved ones and heartrending loss; bitter racism; and even cowardice. While this is the Civil War we as historians are familiar with today, as Gaillard candidly observes, it is [End Page 371] not necessarily the Civil War he remembered hearing about as a child. Gaillard notes that his generation (he was born in 1946) was perhaps the last to be raised with stories of unequivocal southern gallantry during the affair but also the first to be forced to square that veneration with the glaring inequities in southern history forcefully brought to light by the Civil Rights movement. The experience of being caught in that cultural whiplash challenged his notions of what the South he grew up in and was taught to love and respect was all about, indeed by extension what he himself was all about, and prompted this objective look into what it was really like to live through the Civil War. The unusually compelling result both sheds light on the lives of otherwise largely forgotten individuals and, on a small scale, illuminates how southerners’ visceral connection with the war has often blurred the lines between history and regional identity. As Gaillard thoughtfully illustrates, that blend of past and present has been a powerful force in southern culture for a long time and continues to have meaning to us today. Journey to the Wilderness is an entertaining and insightful book that those interested in the Civil War and the broader...

Lutheranism in South Australia — its origins and contributions to South Australian life

In 2015 Australians commemorate the centenary of the Gallipoli landing. To many Australians, Gallipoli is viewed as the formation of our nation, and the foundation of our national identity through ideals such as mateship, bravery, endurance, honour and ingenuity in the face of adversity. Over the next few years of the Centenary of Anzac, Australians, and the world, will be reflecting on the events of World War One. Australia, a newly formed nation, was keen to prove its worth during the war, as were the individuals who went to fight and embark upon what they believed would be a grand adventure. But what was happening in Australia during the war? A particular map of South Australia appeared many times from 1916 in the South Australian newspapers, and even on the front page of the Sydney Mirror. It was captioned with 'Is this Germany or South Australia?' or 'Deutschland Ueber Sued Australien'.

Gert Ehrlich

Gert Ehrlich, who made important contributions to surface science, especially in the area of atomic interactions on solid surfaces, died of leukemia on 10 August 2012 in Urbana, Illinois. Up to five weeks before his death, he worked tirelessly as a professor in the materials science department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He coauthored more than 200 scientific articles and the book Surface Diffusion: Metals, Metal Atoms, and Clusters (Cambridge University Press, 2010).Gert was born on 22 June 1926 in Vienna. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gert and his father, who was Jewish (his mother was Catholic), were detained for questioning but, luckily, released. His father immediately departed for the US, and in May 1939 Gert and his sister, Dorothy, arrived unescorted in New York on the T.S.S. Veendam and were reunited with their father. What might have been a harrowing voyage had become a grand adventure: Gert had investigated all aspects of the ship’s operation and explored the ship from top to bottom. His mother joined the family several months later.In 1944 Gert enrolled at Columbia University. He served in the US Army from 1945 to 1947 and then returned to graduate from the university with honors in chemistry in 1948. He obtained his PhD in chemistry from Harvard University in 1952 under adviser Paul Doty; his thesis title was “Studies on synthetic polyampholytes.” Gert remained at Harvard for a year as a National Institutes of Health fellow. He then served a year as a research associate in the University of Michigan physics department, where he worked with Gordon Sutherland on IR spectroscopy of macromolecules.In 1953 Gert accepted a full-time appointment at the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, where he studied the kinetics of gas–solid interactions. He developed temperature-programmed, or flash, desorption techniques for quantitative kinetic studies at the gas–solid interface and demonstrated the importance of distinct binding sites in chemisorption phenomena.The field ion microscope, invented in 1951 by Erwin Müller, enabled Gert to probe the underlying atomic details of his macroscopic observations. Gert made unique chemisorption studies on single-crystal surfaces and the first quantitative observations of individual atoms diffusing on a metal surface. His resulting 1966 article with Frank Hudda in the Journal of Chemical Physics has been cited more than 1000 times.Gert accepted a professorship at the University of Illinois in 1968. Leading a small group of graduate students and postdocs, he expanded his research toward surface studies on an atomic scale. Using an atom-probe field ion microscope, Gert and his group made the first direct observation of an adatom exchange mechanism. They observed and characterized numerous aspects of surface diffusion, including interior step-edge barriers, reflective plane-edge barriers, adatom–vacancy interactions, temperature-dependent long jumps, and adatom cluster motion. Gert and his group used a variety of theoretical and experimental methods to study atomic behavior and transformed the apparently hopelessly complicated subject of surface diffusion at the atomic scale into one much more understandable and explainable.Among the several honors Gert received were the 1979 Medard W. Welch Award from the American Vacuum Society and the 1982 American Chemical Society Award in Colloid and Surface Chemistry. Through a 1992 research award from the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he worked on boundary layer chemistry and interfacial chemistry at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin with Gerhard Ertl and Jochen Block.Gert was an extremely careful and extraordinarily attentive researcher, with the highest achievable vacuum and precise timing and temperature controls. Gert also was merciless in the proper statistical analysis of data—no small task in the early slide-rule days when access to a computer meant a time-sharing connection on a teletype at 10 characters per second.Perhaps Gert’s most endearing characteristic was his concern for students. His door was always open. When a student would stop by with a question, Gert usually answered with another question to challenge the student. He established a mentoring system in which current students taught the necessary know-how and unpublished techniques to incoming students. When not in the lab, he could easily be found: As he wandered the halls, he would produce a low, enigmatic, warbling whistle, usually his unique rendering of a classical opera aria.Gert was a curious scientist, and his precise work on the behavior of atoms on surfaces was foundational to modern nanoscience and technology. He also was an excellent teacher who compulsively prepared every lecture, even on material he had previously taught. On receiving news about the success of a former student, he would sport a generous grin and his eyes would sparkle.Gert EhrlichPPT|High resolution© 2013 American Institute of Physics.

Inquiry and the Practice of Theoretical Conversation: Engaging in Dialogue to Elaborate Hidden Connections

Our goal at JBL is not just to provide a forum for theoretical conversation but also to proactively invite more insightful and interactive conversation. As active inquiry and open dialogue are critical to achieving this goal, we discuss the nature of inquiry and argue for developing the skills and conditions required to promote dialogue over discussion. Only through more profound dialogue can we address the challenges of a tumultuous decision‐making environment, advance theoretical understanding, and improve managerial practice. We then introduce “Dialogue,” a new feature at JBL, which will consist of concise statements of alternative perspectives and diverse views. Through Dialogue, we invite members of the supply chain community to join colleagues in a grand adventure of knowledge discovery. We hope you will agree that the quest for understanding is more fun when we travel the path of discovery together.

The Addiction Concept and Technology: Diagnosis, Metaphor, or Something Else? A Psychodynamic Point of View

Many today suffer from an imbalance between life and life on the screen. When extreme, such as excessive gaming, clinicians retreat to familiar explanations, such as "Internet addiction." But the addiction concept is of limited value, limiting both research and treatment options. This article discusses an alternative. Pathological overuse is seen as a failed solution in which people become entrapped by technology's promise of delivering that which only life can offer, such as the grand adventure simulated in World of Warcraft. A two-part treatment approach of such "simulation entrapment" is described in which both the original problem and the entrapment are treated, the former by traditional psychodynamic psychotherapy and the later by highlighting differences between the technologically mediated experience and traditional experiences of being bodies together. The case of a college student suffering from pathological shame with excessive gaming as the failed solution is offered as an illustration.

A Grand Tour Interrupted

A Grand Tour Interrupted Nancy Revelle Johnson (bio) Deliver Us from Evil: A Southern Belle in Europe at the Outbreak of World War I by Mary W. Schaller (University of South Carolina Press, 2011. 192 pages. $29.95) Nancy Johnson, the daughter of the Kentucky congressman Ben Johnson, departed for Europe in May 1914 for her grand tour. As befitted someone of her social status, she was accompanied by Ethel Norris, a traveling companion selected by her mother, and a chaperone, Harvey Carroll, newly appointed consul to Venice, and his wife Daisy. Blissfully unaware of the gathering war clouds in Europe, Johnson looked forward to going to Paris to study French and to absorb French culture. Her travel plans were abruptly interrupted by the outbreak of World War i, and she was forced to return to the United States. The story of Nancy Johnson’s aborted grand tour is told by her granddaughter, Mary W. Schaller, in Deliver Us from Evil, the twenty-seventh volume in a series entitled Women’s Diaries and Letters of the South, designed to showcase the writings of southern women of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In reconstructing the grand tour of her grandmother, Schaller relies primarily on the reminiscences and letters of her grandmother, the press clippings recounting her grandmother’s social exploits in Washington, and a memoir, The Sailing of a Refugee Ship, written in 1914 by Arno Behnke, a Dartmouth [End Page ixvii] College sophomore, describing the return voyage of a group of American tourists, including Nancy Johnson, aboard the Italian ship the Principe di Udine. Nancy, a typical southern belle, was educated at Bethlehem and Loretta academies in Kentucky; she became part of the Washington social scene when her father was elected to Congress and played the role expected of her by her family and society. Her job was to chauffeur her father and the speaker of the house, James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark, to and from the Capitol. She later confessed to her granddaughter that she had been born too soon, that she would have been good in business, but there is no evidence that she questioned her role at the time. Educated upper-class women in that era were confronted with a dilemma if they chose not to marry immediately after completing their education. There were those who opted for charity work, and there were those who took more adventurous paths. In the recently published book Nothing Daunted, Dorothy Wickenden details the grand adventure of her grandmother, Dorothy Woodruff, and her friend, Rosamond Underwood: two society girls from Auburn, New York, graduated from Smith College, made the grand tour, then embarked on the great adventure of their lives to Elkhead, Colorado, a frontier outpost, to teach the children of homesteaders. It is unlikely that Congressman Ben Johnson could have been persuaded to allow his daughter to undertake such an adventure. It is doubtful that his daughter would have considered such a scheme, but at age twenty-six, Johnson was restless. The Washington social scene had begun to pall. Hers was the more conventional choice. Influenced by friends who had returned from their own grand tours, she began a campaign to persuade her parents to allow her to go to Europe. Johnson’s parents acceded to her demands. Their hope was that a grand tour would break up her romance with Lieutenant Roscoe Campbell Crawford. Permission was granted for a grand tour suitable for a daughter of privilege. Johnson’s plans were hedged by restrictions imposed by overprotective parents; a chaperone and a traveling companion were considered necessary. Her mother, a devout Catholic, wanted her to have an audience with the Pope, and her parents were insistent that she visit her mother’s family in Holland. In the ensuing tug of war, as the distance between her and her parents increased, Johnson became more assertive in taking control of her travel plans. What Nancy Johnson wanted was greater independence, but she obviously had no objection to traveling in the style suitable for one of her social standing. The twenty-six pieces of luggage that accompanied her testified to her acceptance of her status in society. Johnson’s tour had been under...

Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner's Correspondence from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, 1849-1854 (review)

Reviewed by: Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner's Correspondence from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, 1849-1854 Lance R. Blyth Fiasco: George Clinton Gardner's Correspondence from the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey, 1849-1854. Edited by David J. Weber and Jane Lenz Elder. (Dallas: SMU Press, 2010. Pp. 428. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, sources, index. ISBN 9780870745621, $50.00 cloth.) It is all too easy, as this reviewer has done in survey courses, to present the nineteenth-century United States as a leviathan moving inexorably forth under the banner of Manifest Destiny. But as we move from the macro to the micro on the historiographical scale this view is increasingly distorted. Take, as David J. Weber and Jane Lenz Elder did, the U.S.-Mexico Boundary Survey as experienced by one George Clinton Gardner. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war between the U.S. and Mexico decreed both governments would send representatives to survey and mark the new boundary between the two nations. In February 1849, Gardner, the seventeen-year-old scion of a Washington, D.C., family, received an appointment as the junior assistant to the chief astronomer of the U.S. boundary commission. For the next five years, Gardner worked the line between San Diego and Yuma and then down the Rio Grande from El Paso to the river's end. The whole time Gardner wrote letters, primarily to his family, and these letters make up the bulk of Fiasco with Weber and Elder providing context and additional information. Gardner candidly discussed the personalities, rivalries, and quarrels of the boundary party. He provided day-to-day details of his life in strange lands, often under harsh conditions, including his social life, showing himself as a man of his time and place. Overall the impression the letters leave is that Gardner was a young man enjoying a grand adventure. But his letters also reveal much about the functioning, or dysfunctioning, of the boundary commission, especially its crippling financial and logistical problems. It took Gardner five months to travel from Washington to San Diego as lack of preparation resulted in a three-month delay in cholera-infested Panama. The commission ran out of money while surveying the line in California, placing Gardner on unpaid leave in San Diego for eight months where he fortunately found employment with a family acquaintance as a clerk and spent his spare time riding, writing, dancing, and socializing with the californios. Even after work resumed in July 1850, the survey was not completed until June 1851. Gardner then made his way to El Paso after a short home leave in November 1851, but due to further financial and logistical delays, the survey of the El Paso line was not complete until May 1852. Attempts to survey down the Rio Grande were dogged by a lack of funds, to the extent that the entire commission was disbanded at Ringgold Barracks in Texas, opposite Camargo, Mexico, in December 1852. Gardner went home, but Congress finally disbursed the necessary funds and he returned to the Rio Grande in the summer of 1853 to complete the survey. By January 1854, Gardner was heading back to Washington, D.C., to join his father who had just been appointed the surveyor general of Oregon, missing the final survey of the Gadsden Purchase and ending his time in the Southwest. But was the boundary commission really a fiasco? Or was it just the way the federal government did business in the mid-nineteenth century? An under-explored theme in the history of the West and Southwest is the inability of the federal government [End Page 452] to meet the many requirements it assumed or was assigned. Reach often exceeded grasp, sometimes with tragic results. Gardner's experiences may simply have been par for the course. Yet this is only apparent from such a personal, micro, view. With Weber's and Elder's efforts in Fiasco we now have material with which to begin to make such inquiries. [End Page 453] Lance R. Blyth U.S. Northern Command Copyright © 2011 The Texas State Historical Association

Mark Twain: Man in White. The Grand Adventure of His Final Years

New York: Random House, 2010. xxxix + 484 pp. $30.00, cloth.

Mark Twain: Man in White. The Grand Adventure of His Final Years

Mark Twain: Man in White. The Grand Adventure of His Final Years

Mark Twain: Man in White. The Grand Adventure of His Final Years

Mark Twain: Man in White. The Grand Adventure of His Final Years

Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell’s Feral Tale

Uncovering the Child in Timothy Treadwell’s Feral Tale Ellen Brinks (bio) When I became a man, I put away childish things. King James Bible He would rather lie down with the animals than stand up with the men. Franz Kafka Timothy Treadwell has quickly become the stuff of (American) legend, inspiring several books and short films, as well as a feature-length documentary by Werner Herzog, entitled Grizzly Man (2005). Treadwell’s is the story of an individual who lived with Alaskan wild bears for thirteen summers, until his and a companion’s death by a bear in 2003. The narrative arc recalls other stories of young men who shun civilization and seek a more authentic existence in the wild. Early incarnations include real-life figures such as Daniel Boone to more recent ones such as Alex McCandless (in Jon Krakauer’s and now Sean Penn’s Into the Wild).1 Beyond a fascination with the psychic dilemmas and desires that shape the unique contours of these lives, lies a collective, cultural uncertainty and controversy regarding the place of wilderness in (North American) life and different styles of masculinity, all constituted in relation to Nature as Other. What is missing from discussions of Timothy Treadwell’s story thus far—especially its discursive constructions in Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005), Treadwell’s own autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1996), and Nick Jans’s bestselling The Grizzly Maze: Timothy Treadwell’s Fatal Obsession with Alaskan Bears (2005)—is the centrality of childhood and so-called childlike [End Page 304] or childish behaviors and longings to its ideological meanings, including the texts’ understandings of Treadwell’s demise. Most obviously, the adult Timothy positions himself as a boy-child. Herzog’s Grizzly Man, for example, contains “films within a film” by another director, namely, a large amount of video footage that Timothy Treadwell himself shot, narrated, and intended for use in his advocacy work on behalf of Alaskan bears.2 In this footage, Treadwell projects a child-like persona, conveyed in part by his abundant energy (when he is being chased by “Timmy the fox,” the mood is breathless, buoyant, and joyous); by his “Prince Valiant” haircut (which, as one friend recalls, utterly disguises his receding hairline); by his diet of peanut butter sandwiches, candy bars, and Coke; and by the presence of his childhood teddy bear as tent-mate. His narration casts him as a boy surviving alone on a grand adventure, a young hero who has animals as his closest friends: “Now let the expedition continue. Now it’s off with Timmy the Fox. We’ve got to find Banjo—he’s missing!” Further, the audiences for his films were primarily schoolchildren. During the winter, Treadwell—dubbed “a Pied Piper in a children’s crusade” by Jans (23)—used images and segments from these films in presentations he designed to educate children about the risks grizzlies face from diminished wild habitat and poaching, gleaned from the life he shared with them. While the audience, then, for much of his filmmaking is clearly children, Grizzly Man’s mainly adult viewers can simply write Treadwell himself off as “infantile,” criticizing moments such as the one where his narration slips into a child’s intonation and pitch. After filming a grizzly rearing up and scratching his back against a tree, Treadwell goes up to the spot, measures the bear’s size with his own body by way of comparison, and with a deep intake of breath, drawn out vowels, and a breathless intonation, asserts, “Oh he’s a big bear. He’s a very big bear. A very big bear. . . . He’s a big bear.” Because Timothy fashions himself in his films and in his non-fiction autobiography, Among Grizzlies (1997), as someone who is essentially acting out a familiar fantasy ascribed to children—living in communion with wild animals, the bears and the foxes whom he knows “by name”—Treadwell’s story is clearly a feral tale, a genre of children’s literature in which a childhood lived in the wild figures prominently.3 Feral tales have mythic and folkloric roots worldwide, depicting children raised by animals or as the offspring of animals (Romulus and...