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2 books match the query 'Notebook'

cover of TO THE POLE: The Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd, 1925–1927

TO THE POLE

The Diary and Notebook of Richard E. Byrd, 1925–1927

Edited by Raimund E. Goerler

The Ohio State University Press, 1998

On May 9, 1926, Richard E. Byrd announced to the world that he and copilot Floyd Bennett were the first to fly an airplane over the North Pole. Documents published here for the first time provide new insights into this most controversial accomplishment of Byrd's career.

Some journalists at the time questioned whether Byrd's airplane, the Josephine Ford, could have reached the North Pole and returned in less than sixteen hours. More questions arose after Byrd's death in 1957. A Swedish meteorologist concluded that the Josephine Ford would have needed a beneficial wind to accomplish the feat, and his study of weather data indicated that there had been no such wind. In 1973 another author reported that Byrd's pilot had later confessed to Bernt Balchen, a Norwegian pilot who had assisted Byrd, that they had only circled on the horizon out of sight of reporters and landed when enough time had passed to claim the North Pole.

To the Pole presents transcriptions of Byrd's handwritten diary and notebook, which were discovered by Ohio State University archivist Raimund Goerler in 1996 when he was cataloging Byrd's papers for the university. In his diary Byrd recorded his preparations for the North Pole flight, and he used it as a message pad to communicate with his pilot when the deafening noise from the plane's engines rendered verbal communication impossible.

Byrd also wrote his navigational calculations on the leaves of his diary, and photographs of these crucial pages are presented in the book as well, along with a copy of Byrd's official report on the expedition to the National Geographic Society.

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cover of The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making

The Poet's Freedom

A Notebook on Making

Susan Stewart

University of Chicago Press, 2011

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet’s Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work.

Stewart traces the ideas of freedom and making through insightful readings of an array of Western philosophers and poets—Plato, Homer, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Dante, and Coleridge are among her key sources. She begins by considering the theme of making in the Hebrew Scriptures, examining their accountof a god who creates the world and leaves humans free to rearrange and reform the materials of nature. She goes on to follow the force of moods, sounds, rhythms, images, metrical rules, rhetorical traditions, the traps of the passions, and the nature of language in the cycle of making and remaking. Throughout the book she weaves the insight that the freedom to reverse any act of artistic making is as essential as the freedom to create.
 
A book about the pleasures of making and thinking as means of life, The Poet’s Freedom explores and celebrates the freedom of artists who, working under finite conditions, make considered choices and shape surprising consequences. This engaging and beautifully written notebook on making will attract anyone interested in the creation of art and literature.
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