In A Life of Commas, Mr. Johnson takes readers along on his roller coaster ride through fear and struggle, triumph and joy, leaving us inspired by his positivity, persistence, and faith.

We learn to speak and understand our native language without any great effort, for these are natural aspects of the maturation of every human being. The skills of reading and writing, by contrast, have to be learned, usually in an educational context. Now, when it comes to a foreign language, all the skills (speaking, un derstanding, reading and writing) have to be learned - nothing can be acquired without considerable effort. This learning process does not take place in a vac uum: it is heavily influenced by our previous experience of acquiring our native language and learning to read and write it. These facts have been taken as the background to this book. We aim this book at native speakers of Dutch who have learned to read and write their own language, and who now wish to add skill in writing English to their repertoire. Since this is our well-defined target group, we will be continually pointing to those aspects of written English which differ from comparable aspects of written Dutch, while also giving a complete guide to the writing process. There are two matters concerning the presentation of information in this book that require clarification in advance. Firstly, the book contains hundreds of numbered examples.

Armed with only his rifled musket, Kimber M. Snyder was credited with leading the charge to release Civil War prisoners. One of four fighting sons of a young widow from the hills of Pennsylvania, Kimber decided it was time to go and rescue his fellow soldiers. Tied to trees in the middle of winter, Snyder led a group of men out of their tents to commit this daring deed. However, what made this action so remarkable was that this rescue was not aimed at the Confederates, but at his Union officers! And the prisoners were not southern Rebels, but rather boys from back home, who had refused to forage for food in the middle of winter without shoes and coats. The armed confrontation between the enlisted men and the officers led to Kimbers arrest. The court martial trial that followed was a mixture of truth, lies and conveniently forgotten testimony that led to his acquittal and later, a promotion. This book follows the history of Kimber M. Snyder from his familys early years in colonialPennsylvania to his service in the Civil War with the 78th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Regiment. Included are vivid descriptions of the 78ths military service and their involvement at such major battles as Stones River, Chickamauga and Picketts Mill. In addition, there are new insights and interpretations of the regiments role at the latter two battles, where they have been criticized by some for their performance. By using casualty figures and Union and Confederate records, a new light is shed on the 78ths fighting record. While this book is a story of Snyders life and those of his wife and children, it is also the tale of Henderson and Union Counties in western Kentucky and Posey County in southern Indiana, where the veteran tried to eek out a living, while raising his family. Court transcripts, battle reports, census returns, diaries, family lore and years of old newspaper articles are used to illustrate the last half of the 19th century. The Gilded Age excesses of this era escaped the Snyders grasp, as it did with so many others in the lower Ohio River Valley. Presidential and local politics, high profile trials, the weather, farm prices and the everyday happenings of the region are detailed as the Snyders along with many others, blended into the rural landscape, but more importantly contributed to the building of the country we know today.

A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative anglophone poetries from decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Martin Bell, the former BBC was reporter and Independent MP, served as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment during the Cyprus emergency between 1957 and 1959. In a chocolate box in the attic many years later he found more than 100 letters that he had sent home to his family. He was not a journalist then, but the letters give a vivid impression of what it was like to be a conscript on active service during the EOKA rebellion against British rule. They describe road blocks and cordons and searches, murders and explosions and riots Ð and a strategy of armed repression that ultimately failed. From this beginning he has written The End of Empire. His narrative is a powerful and personal account of the violent process of decolonization, of the character of the British Army at the time and the impact of National Service on young men who were not much more than Ôkids in uniformÕ. It also gives a graphic insight into the ultimate futility of the use of force in wars among people and it reveals the true story of the insurgency and the campaign to defeat it. By drawing on recently declassified documents, he shows that Cyprus in the late 1950s was run not by the governor but by a military junta. The army commanders were looking for the knockout blow that would deliver victory, but their misguided tactics served only to strengthen support for their enemy. So The End Of Empire is much more than a personal reminiscence. It is an absorbing account of the experience of army life from the perspective of a private soldier, and it is the inside story of how Britain tried to crush a violent rebellion sixty years ago.

Joseph J. Hoyle enlisted in the Confederate Army in May 1862 as a private. By the time of his death in September 1864, he was serving as a lieutenant in the 55th Regiment North Carolina Troops. The personal letters of this soldier, supplemented by the editor's overview of the events and actions of the regiment, offer a view of the common soldier as well as battlefield and camp culture. The letters also reveal, among other things, how this former schoolteacher urged his fellow soldiers forward at Gettysburg despite a sense that the cause was lost.