Bishop Books

History records that Billy Bishop was the top-ranking British Empire ace of World War I, scoring 72 kills and winning every major decoration for bravery including a Victoria Cross for a lone early morning attack on a German airfield. For years that record has been suspect and now, at long last, the truth regarding Bishop's claims is revealed in this bookshell of a book.

Even a cursory examination of Bishop's record brings up glaring problems.
First of all, most of his "victories" were not witnessed or confirmed by other Allied aircrew or ground personnel, being accepted solely on the basis of his word. This includes the 2 June 1917 airfield attack where he claimed three kills. Few if any other British pilots were treated similarly. Why was he treated thusly?

Second, Bishop scored victories at a much higher rate than any other Empire ace even in his first month of combat flying. Yet curiously he rarely scored kills while flying with others; almost all of his claims were made on lone wolf missions. It seems odd that a high-scoring ace would lose his shooting eye when flying with others only to have it reappear once he went aloft alone.

Lastly, Bishop's own accounts of his missions were embellished with every re-telling.

After rigorously examining Bishop's claims using all existing sources of information including postwar examination of German loss reports, author Brereton Greenhous comes to the devastating conclusion that Billy Bishop "was a distinguished fraud - a brave flyer but a bold liar." At best Greenhous calculates Bishop may have downed 27 German aircraft; the other 40-odd claims were optimistic or totally imaginary! The airfield attack never happened; his VC and most of his other decorations undeserved.

Greenhous maintains Bishop was aided and abetted in this disception by his 60 Squadron CO, Major Jack Scott, and top RFC commanders. Scott wanted maximum publicity for the squadron hence he pushed Bishop's claims through uncritically and sometimes embellished Bishop's own combat reports. The brass wanted and needed a British air ace hero to counter the endless publicity given the Red Baron and to stiffen the morale of RFC aircrew who were suffering crippling losses. Consequently they too turned a blind eye to the lack of confirmation.

This book exemplifies historical research at its finest. Rather than blandly repeating the accepted Billy Bishop story, Greenhous examined all available documentation with a critical eye and assembled a well-reasoned, dispassionate summary of Bishop's career and accomplishments.

After 90 years, the truth regarding Billy Bishop has finally seen the light of day. This book receives my highest recommendation!

I loved it! Great book! The recipes are really easy and funny.

This book is a classic of Pacific archaeology/anthropology.
Please correct the typo in the title! The word is "archipelago."

After reading all three books in the Moral Vampire series, I have to say that they are all excellent books. The books are well written and offer a variety of scenes to keep you laughing, crying, and on the edge of you seat waiting to find out what will happen next. While reading these books, I found it very hard to put them down and finished reading them fairly quickly. And I also came away having felt that I learned something from all of the life's lesson that are taught throughout the books, something I can't say everything I read. I highly recommend these books to anyone in their teenage and adult years.

The well researched and authentically related adventures of clever Maui the trickster hold an attraction for my two young sons. The story is clearly told with concise text opposite striking sea green and reddish brown block print illustrations. I first felt the illustrations might be too dull for my active boys brought up on Disney videos, but I underestimated them and this lovely medium. The artwork truly captures the simplicity and boldness of the ancient times of Maui. A wonderful memento of Hawaii, but also a stimulating picture book.

Carly Bishop's "McQuaid's Justice" is a story of rare complexity and depth, a mystery that left me so curious as to what was going on that I read it in one night. FBI agent Cy McQuaid is called in when a judge--and Supreme Court nominee--is threatened with extortion. Someone is claiming that the death of the judge's wife many years ago was not an accident, but murder. In the course of his investigation, McQuaid goes head to head with the judge's daughter, Amy. Amy has been deaf ever since the night of her mother's death, and in order to find the truth of what happened, she might just have to confront the worst memories locked in the recesses of her mind, with only McQuaid to support her.

That's only a portion of what is happening in this book, which introduces a wide-range of characters and serves as the first chapter of the "Cowboy Code" miniseries. I never stopped caring about Cy or Amy, and it was them, along with the riveting mystery, that wouldn't let me put the book down. There's a lot of genuine feeling in everything they experience together. This book is a great example of a miniseries book, telling a self-contained, satisfying story in 250 pages, yet leaving us with a humdinger of a cliffhanger that left me anxiously awaiting Book Two, "A Cowboy's Honor," by Laura Gordon.

Still, it wasn't a perfect book. The romance could have been developed more, and all the many pieces fit together a little too neatly, with too much reliance on coincidences to twist the plot. In any case, "McQuaid's Justice" is notable mostly for the superb mystery, which offered much more than many regular mystery novels I've read. The characters and story linger in the mind, and the series promises to offer a lot more in the months ahead. A definite must-read.

I am a lucky man to be Dr. Phil Bishop's student.

He is not only intelligent and very good a teacher, but also a good friend after class for everyone. After teaching more than 25 yerars, he wrote this book, which is important for all the future scholars who want to do indeps research in Education, especially for me, in the area of exercise physiology.

It is my hope that one day I will be such an exceptional scientist. And hope everyone can learn a lot from this outstanding book.

".....
This book is therefore restricted to a treatment of the triaxial test alone, and of the ways of meeting the various problems which arise in its use in the laboratory.
It cannot be repeated too often that the results are of practical significance only if the geology of the site is understood and if the samples are truly representative of the natural strata or fill, but it is outside the scope of the present treatment to elaborate on this theme.

The book is devided into four parts (as it is as product detail, or editor reviews)....

This book is not intended to serve as a manual.

Its purpose is to explain the significant factors in the various types of triaxial test, and to draw attention to matters of PRACTICAL DETAIL WHICH EXPERIENCE HAS SHOWN TO BE INPORTANT.
The authors have drawn primarily on the experience of the Soil Mechanics Laboratory at Imperial College...."
[from the book of the preface by A. W. B., and D. J. H., Imperial College, 1957, except the (as it is as product detail, or editor reviews)]

The hopeful assertion that frames this elegant study is that "the pilgrim's experience is never completely beyond our reach" (82). In this revision of her 1994 Harvard dissertation, Professor Frank has her scholarly sights fixed on the "religious sensibilities" of late ancient Christians, gleaned primarily (although not exclusively) from two Christian accounts of pilgrimages to visit Egyptian monks in the fourth and fifth centuries: the anonymous Historia monachorum in Aegypto and Palladius' Historia Lausiaca. Frank's study aims at more than a description of the inner world of two Christian travelers, however: it seeks also to articulate how students of late ancient Christianity might write a historical account of "religious experience" without being naïve or essentialist. To this end, she employs tools of literary analysis, as well as social-historical and anthropological studies, to craft a narrative that is theoretically aware while remaining sympathetic to its subject. Through careful analysis of "the poetics of pilgrims' writings" (3), Frank pursues a finer understanding of "the religious sensibilities behind pilgrimage to the living" (31).

In chapter one, Frank places the practice and the literature of "pilgrimage to the living" in their social and literary contexts. Here she lays out some of the central themes that will emerge from her study: exoticism in these Christian travel writings, the "biblical realism" that informed and emerged from these texts, and the emphasis on visuality as the privileged transmitter of moral and divine truth.

The second chapter examines these historiai as means of "cultural translation" (37), mediating the foreignness of Egyptian asceticism to the more temperate climate of "everyday" Christians. Palladius and the anonymous author of the Historia monachorum emphasized and exoticized the spatial and temporal distance between the reader and the "living saint," who inhabited a thoroughly biblical and miraculous world. According to Frank, the miraculous and exotic were familiar tropes from Hellenistic travel writing, and she concludes that these literary "displacements" served both to mediate the strangeness of the desert ascetic for a more worldly Christian audience and to allow that audience to "experience" the Bible in a new and thrilling register.

In chapter 3, Frank turns away from her historiai to other texts that recount travel (literal and figurative) to "people," including mystical accounts of ascent to God (Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses ), visions of heroes and villains in para-dise and hell (the apocryphal Apocalypse of Paul ), and hagiographic accounts of pilgrimage to ascetic figures (Jerome's Life of Paul the First Hermit ). This particular concatenation of physical and spiritual "travels" allows Frank to isolate a persistently articulated desire on the part of the traveler: the desire to see the face of the object of travel and achieve thereby an ultimately salvific ex-perience.

The remaining chapters build on this insight. Chapter 4 asks why visuality was the preferred sensory idiom of the pilgrim's experience, while chapter 5 turns to the question of "the ascetic face" as the object of religious desire and medium of divine transformation. Through an examination of classical sources on "the senses" and the literature of pilgrimage to holy sites, Frank concludes in chapter 4 that, throughout antiquity, vision retained a peculiarly "tactile" quality, so that sight and touch together were means by which experience itself was encoded and understood. Through a reading of physiognomic literature, Frank determines in chapter 5 that "the ascetic face" was the site (and sight) at which Christians could best visualize, and appropriate, a desired "biblical realism." For these pilgrim-authors, "the face had become the canvas of biblical identity"; as such, the saints' faces "functioned as another tool by which to fragment and selectively reassemble the pilgrims' experiences" (162-64). Through the faces of the living saints to whom they traveled (and whom they inscribed in their historiai ), these Christian authors "found a language for portable sanctity" (170).

The final chapter embeds these conclusions about the function of travel writing and Christian physiognomy into a broader theory of "visual piety," by which Frank signals "Christian practices in which a lingering gaze conjures a sacred presence" (174). She considers the later Christian phenomena of relic and icon veneration, and suggests that "by this tactile and conjuring eye of faith, pilgrims articulated a theology of vision that would find its fullest expression in the cult of icons" (181).

One place where Frank's analysis loses some traction is in the use of non-Christian sources to inform Christian texts. It is unclear how she envisions the literary or contextual relationship between these bodies of literature: Is it a question of cultural "appropriation" or "background" (see 32)? Are we to imag-ine a common "affinity" or "resemblance" (56-58) between world-views, "echoes" (129), or a wholesale "Christianization" of pagan sensibilities (163)? Her use of diverse non-Christian sources is at times ingenious and illuminating (the use of physiognomic literature is particularly deft), but in her careful tri-angulation of literature, experience, and world-view, the confrontation of poten-tially competing or complementary literatures, experiences, and world-views could only enrich her study.

This is, however, an extremely minor quibble. The graceful language and use of both Christian and non-Christian sources, from Phlegon of Tralles to Euna-pius of Sardis, make this volume a fitting addition to Peter Brown's Transformation of the Classical Heritage series. Throughout the work, Frank is refreshingly consistent in both her critical reading and sympathetic approach to ancient religious experiences. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scholars interested in the intersections of thought and action, of literature and life, will find tremendous value in the subject and approach of this book.

Andrew S. Jacobs

A readable and comprehensive account of the science of materials, ranging in its coverage from pure metals to superalloys, from glasses to engineering ceramics, and from everyday plastics to in situ composites.

Numerous examples are given of the ways in which knowledge of the relation between fine structure and properties has made it possible to optimize the service behaviour of traditional engineering materials and to develop completely new and exciting classes of materials.
Special consideration is given to the crucial processing stage that enables materials to be produced a useful and relatively concise survey of key materials and their interrelationships,
THE AUTHORS HAVE TRIED TO MAKE THE SUBJECT ACCESSIBLE TO A WIDE RANGE OF READERS,
to provide insights into specialized methods of examination and to convey the excitement of an atmosphere in which new materials are being conceived and developed.

Contents: The structure and bonding of atoms; Atomic arrangements in materials; Structural phases; their formation and transitions; Defects in solids; The characterization of materials; The physical properties of materials; Mechanical behaviour of materials; Strengtherning and toughening; Modern alloy developments; Ceramics and glasses; Plastics and composites; Corrosion and surface engineering.

Professor R. E. Smallman
After gaining his PhD in 1953, Professor Smallman spent five years at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, before returning to the University of Birmingham where he became Professor of Physical Metallurgy in 1964 and Feeney Professor and Head of the Department of Physical Metallurgy and Science of Materials in 1969.
He subsequently became Head of the amalgamated Department of Metallurgy and Materials (1981), Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, and the first Dean of the newlycreated Engineering Faculty in 1985.
For five years he was Vice-Principal of the University (1987-92).
He has held visiting professorship appointments at the University of Stanford, Berkeley, Pennsylvania (USA), New South Wales (Australia), Hong Kong and Cape Town and has received Honorary Doctorates from the University of Novi Sad (Yugoslavia) and the University of Wales.
His research work has been recognized by the award of the Sir George Beilby Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry and Institute of Metals (1969), the Rosenhain Medal for contributions to Physical Metallurgy (1972) and the Platinum Medal, the premier medal of the Institute of Materials (1989).

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (1986), a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (1990) and appointed a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1992.
A former Council Member of the Science and Engineering Research Council, he is a Council Member of the Institute of Materials and President of the Federated European Materials Societies.

R. J. Bishop
After working in laboratories of the automobile, forging, tube-drawing and razor blade industries (1944-59), Ray Bishop became a Principal Scientist of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (1959-68), studying the hot corrosion of superheater tubes in power station boilers and fluidized bed systems.
He then became a Senior Lecturer in Materials Science at the Polytechnic (now University) of Wolverhampton, acting at various times as leader of C&G, HNC, TEC and CNAA honours degree courses and supervising postgraduate research.
Since 1986, he has been a part-time Lecturer in the School of Metallurgy and Materials at the University of Birmingham.

[from the book]