Reflections On Captivity

On October 17, 1965, Navy LTJG Porter Halyburton was shot down over North Vietnam on his 76th mission and listed as killed in action. One-and-a-half years later he was found to be alive and a prisoner of war. Halyburton was held captive for more than seven years. Reflections on Captivity, is a collection of fifty short stories about this young naval officer's experiences as a POW in North Vietnam. ​This book recounts difficult times but focuses more on the positive aspects I—the humor, creativity, friendships, courage, and leadership of an amazing group of Americans and how they helped each other survive and even thrive. These vignettes demonstrate how the human mind, body, and spirit can adapt and find meaning in life in the most challenging circumstances. There are powerful lessons learned from this complex experience that continue to guide the author's life to this day. Despite hardship, suffering, and long separation, Halyburton strongly believes one's quality of life is determined more by choices made than by circumstances, and the most liberating choice we can make is to forgive. Reflections on Captivity furthers the reader's understanding about the nature of captivity, race relations, human relations, aspects of the air war against North Vietnam, and highlights the importance of leadership, ethics, and devotion to duty in difficult times.

How two Vietnam POWs, one white and one black, formed an unexpected friendship that saved them both: “A moving story.” —John McCain Fred Cherry was one of the few black pilots taken prisoner by the Vietnamese, tortured and intimidated by captors who tried and failed to get him to sign antiwar statements. Porter Halyburton was a white southern navy flier who the Vietnamese threw into a cell with Cherry at the famous Hanoi Hilton, hoping that close quarters would inspire racial tensions to boil over. Instead, they fostered an intense connection that would help both men survive the war—and continue for the rest of their lives. An unforgettable story of courage and friendship, Two Souls Indivisible is a compelling reminder of what can be achieved, in the face of incredible odds, when we put our differences aside. “A riveting tale . . . Two Souls Indivisible joins the small list of essential tomes on the war, race, and to an even larger degree, books that describe the true meaning of heroism.” —The Seattle Times “A moving story of two men whose courage, sense of duty, and love proved greater than the depravity of their captors.” —Sen. John McCain

In almost 40 per cent of households in North America, dogs are kept as companion animals. Dogs may be man's best friends, but what are humans to dogs? If these animals' loyalty and unconditional love have won our hearts, why do we so often view closely related wild canids, such as foxes, wolves, and coyotes, as pests, predatory killers, and demons? Re-examining the complexity and contradictions of human attitudes towards these animals, Dog's Best Friend? looks at how our relationships with canids have shaped and also been transformed by different political and economic contexts. Journeying from ancient Greek and Roman societies to Japan's Edo period to eighteenth-century England, essays explore how dogs are welcomed as family, consumed in Asian food markets, and used in Western laboratories. Contributors provide glimpses of the lives of street dogs and humans in Bali, India, Taiwan, and Turkey and illuminate historical and current interactions in Western societies. The book delves into the fantasies and fears that play out in stereotypes of coyotes and wolves, while also acknowledging that events such as the Wolf Howl in Canada's Algonquin Park indicate the emergence of new popular perspectives on canids. Questioning where canids belong, how they should be treated, and what rights they should have, Dog's Best Friend? reconsiders the concept of justice and whether it can be extended beyond the limit of the human species.

In The End of Captivity?, Tripp York addresses how we talk about the good of other animals in light of a stark impossibility: their freedom from us. While all of us in the animal (and plant) kingdom are interdependent upon one another, humans are unique in that we are the only animals who keep other animals captive. We keep animals in zoos, sanctuaries, circuses, conservatories, aquariums, research facilities, slaughterhouses, and on our farms and in our homes. York asks what such forms of captivity say about us, and how animal captivity shapes what we imagine to be the purpose of other animals. What does the fact that elephants, tigers, and horses perform in circuses say about how we see the world? What does the reality of zoological parks say about the people who create, support, decry, protest, and patronize them? How important is wildlife conservation for the good of the earth? What does "who" we put on our plate say about how we understand the theological role of other animals? These are just a few questions York tackles as he weaves through the convoluted politics surrounding the captive animals in our midst.

Radically rethinks the theoretical parameters through which we interpret both current and past ideas of captivity, adoption, and slavery among Native American societies in an interdisciplinary perspective. Highlights the importance of the interaction between perceptions, representations and lived experience associated with the facts of slavery.

Best known as a lecturer, a hostage negotiator, and as a Beirut hostage himself, Terry Waite here collects and comments on excerpts from his favorite books read during his confinement, the ones he remembers from his past, and the ones he wished he had been given. Line drawings.

In a methodological discussion of this issue, the contributors cover a range of topics, from ancient poltics to modern ideology. The entity known as 'the Exile' has had an extremely forceful influence in Old Testament scholarship, both as an event and as a symbol. But was there an 'Exile'? And if so, how did it fit into the pattern of population deportations that characterized the imperial strategies of the ancient Near East? In a major methodological discussion of this issue, the contributors to this symposium of the European Seminar in Historical Methodology cover a range of topics, from ancient politics to modern ideology. In probing the meaning and implication of 'Exile' they also reflect a spectrum of opinions and conclusions. As with Volume 1 of this series, the editor has provided an introduction and concluding reflections.

Few reference works in philosophy have articles on hope. Few also are systematic or large-scale philosophical studies of hope. Hope is admitted to be important in people's lives, but as a topic for study, hope has largely been left to psychologists and theologians. For the most part philosophers treat hope en passant. My aim is to outline a general theory of hope, to explore its structure, forms, goals, reasonableness, and implications, and to trace the implications of such a theory for atheism or theism. What has been written is quite disparate. Some see hope in an individualistic, often existential, way, and some in a social and political way. Hope is proposed by some as essentially atheistic, and by others as incomprehensible outside of one or another kind of theism. Is it possible to think consistently and at the same time comprehensively about the phenomenon of human hoping? Or is it several phenomena? How could there be such diverse understandings of so central a human experience? On what rational basis could people differ over whether hope is linked to God? What I offer here is a systematic analysis, but one worked out in dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Immanuel Kant, and Gabriel Marcel. Ernst Bloch of course was a Marxist and officially an atheist, Gabriel Marcel a Christian theist, and Immanuel Kant was a theist, but not in a conventional way.

This new analysis of internment outside Europe helps us to understand the First World War as a truly global conflict.

Exploring how readers received and responded to literary works in the long eighteenth century, M-C. Newbould focuses on the role played by Laurence Sterne’s fiction and its adaptations. Literary adaptation flourished throughout the eighteenth century, encouraging an interactive relationship between writers, readers, and artists when well-known works were transformed into new forms across a variety of media. Laurence Sterne offers a particularly dynamic subject: the immense interest provoked by The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy inspired an unrivalled number and range of adaptations from their initial publication onwards. In placing her examination of Sterneana within the context of its production, Newbould demonstrates how literary adaptation operates across generic and formal boundaries. She breaks new ground by bringing together several potentially disparate aspects of Sterneana belonging to areas of literary studies that include drama, music, travel writing, sentimental fiction and the visual. Her study is a vital resource for Sterne scholars and for readers generally interested in cultural productivity in this period.

Mediterranean Captivity through Arab Eyes, 1517-1798 is the first book that examines the Arabic captivity narratives in the early modern period. Based on Arabic sources in archives stretching from Amman to Fez to London and Rome, Matar presents the story of captivity from the perspective of the Arabic-speaking captives who have not been examined in the growing field of captivity studies.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain, captivity emerged as a persistent metaphor as well as a material reality. The exercise of power on both an institutional and a personal level created conditions in which those least empowered, particularly women, perceived themselves to be captive subjects. This "domestic captivity" was inextricably connected to England’s systematic enslavement of kidnapped Africans and the wealth accumulation realized from those actions, even as early fictional narratives suppressed or ignored the experience of the enslaved. Domestic Captivity and the British Subject, 1660–1750 explores how captivity informed identity, actions, and human relationships for white British subjects as represented in fictional texts by British authors from the period. This work complicates interpretations of canonical authors such as Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Eliza Haywood and asserts the importance of authors such as Penelope Aubin and Edward Kimber. Drawing on the popular press, unpublished personal correspondence, and archival documents, Catherine Ingrassia provides a rich cultural description that situates literary texts from a range of genres within the material world of captivity. Ultimately, the book calls for a reevaluation of how literary texts that code a heretofore undiscussed connection to the slave trade or other types of captivity are understood.