[PDF] Train Wreck eBook

Author : George Bibel
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 25,84 MB
Release : 2012-10-07
Category : Science
ISBN : 1421405903

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Trains are massive—with some weighing 15,000 tons or more. When these metal monsters collide or go off the rails, their destructive power becomes clear. In this book, George Bibel presents riveting tales of trains gone wrong, the detective work of finding out why, and the safety improvements that were born of tragedy. Train Wreck details 17 crashes in which more than 200 people were killed. Readers follow investigators as they sift through the rubble and work with computerized event recorders to figure out what happened. Using a mix of eyewitness accounts and scientific explanations, Bibel draws us into a world of forensics and human drama. Train Wreck is a fascinating exploration of• runaway trains• bearing failures• metal fatigue• crash testing • collision dynamics• bad rails

Author : Eric G. Wilson
Publisher : Sarah Crichton Books
Page : 152 pages
File Size : 47,34 MB
Release : 2012-02-14
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1429969482

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Why can't we look away? Whether we admit it or not, we're fascinated by evil. Dark fantasies, morbid curiosities, Schadenfreude: As conventional wisdom has it, these are the symptoms of our wicked side, and we succumb to them at our own peril. But we're still compelled to look whenever we pass a grisly accident on the highway, and there's no slaking our thirst for gory entertainments like horror movies and police procedurals. What makes these spectacles so irresistible? In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the scholar Eric G. Wilson sets out to discover the source of our attraction to the caustic, drawing on the findings of biologists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, theologians, and artists. A professor of English literature and a lifelong student of the macabre, Wilson believes there's something nourishing in darkness. "To repress death is to lose the feeling of life," he writes. "A closeness to death discloses our most fertile energies." His examples are legion, and startling in their diversity. Citing everything from elephant graveyards and Susan Sontag's On Photography to the Tiger Woods sex scandal and Steel Magnolias, Wilson finds heartening truths wherever he confronts death. In Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck, the perverse is never far from the sublime. The result is a powerful and delightfully provocative defense of what it means to be human—for better and for worse.

Author : Sady Doyle
Publisher : Melville House
Page : 353 pages
File Size : 41,11 MB
Release : 2017-08-29
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1612196489

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“Smart ... compelling ... persuasive .” —New York Times Book Review She’s everywhere once you start looking: the trainwreck. She’s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying “crack is whack,” and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself. From Mary Wollstonecraft—who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to “behave.” Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Doyle’s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.

Author : Sean Carswell
Publisher : Manic D Press
Page : 254 pages
File Size : 35,98 MB
Release : 2008-05-01
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1933149655

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“Sean Carswell is a wonderful storyteller. . . . Reading his stuff makes you laugh and makes you think.”—Howard Zinn “[Carswell’s writing is] the antidote to what is so boring or safe or wrong with modern book publishing.”—Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned Train Wreck Girl is the funny and tragic story of one man’s quest to figure out what to do with his life now that it’s too late for him to die young. After finding his girlfriend dead on the railroad tracks right after breaking up with her, Danny McGregor—Flagstaff bartender and surfer without an ocean—rides the next bus out of Arizona, fleeing to his Cocoa Beach, Florida, hometown, where a maelstrom of past ghosts await. Back in Florida, his treacherous friend, Bart, finds Danny a job picking up corpses. Sophie, a former crazy girlfriend who stabbed Danny, wants to rekindle their relationship. Taylor, a twelve-year-old neighborhood girl, only wants Danny to teach her to surf. And then there’s Helen, with a face that launched a dozen Greyhounds. Through the chaos, Danny discovers his strengths amid all his weaknesses and is able to move forward while making peace with his past. Sean Carswell is a former carpenter, housepainter, dishwasher, and warehouse clerk. His fiction has appeared in dozens of literary journals. He has been a staff writer for Flipside, Clamor, and Ink 19, and is a regular contributor to Razorcake. A co-founder of Gorsky Press, he is currently a professor at the University of California.

Author : Robert C. Reed
Publisher : Pictorial History of Accidents
Page : 190 pages
File Size : 21,26 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN :

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American railroad history is filled with accounts of misadventure. Steam boilers blew up. Bridges collapsed under the weight of heavy engines. Locomotives crashed head-on because of signal failures. Passenger cars derailed, often with dire results. Lightly built wooden coaches splintered on impact, and the debris often ignited from the coals in the iron stoves used for heating. In the mid-nineteenth century American railroading was burgeoning -- a growth too fast for safe operations. Despite the grim statistics of 19th and early 20th century train wrecks that resulted, one cannot help but find the photographs and public prints of the day interesting. When you pick up this wondrous book, you will have a hard time putting it down.

Author : Jeff Nichols
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 259 pages
File Size : 11,51 MB
Release : 2009-07-21
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 143911286X

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Hilarious and oddly inspiring, Trainwreck is proof that a life disastrously lived can still turn out beyond anybody's wildest imaginings. Growing up a privileged Manhattan kid, Jeff Nichols should have had it all. Instead, he got a plethora of impairments: learning disabilities, a speech impediment, dyslexia, ADD, and a mild case of Tourette's syndrome. In Trainwreck, his weird and witty memoir of utter dysfunction, Nichols gives an irreverent look at how one "idoit" made good.

Author : Gordon Bond
Publisher :
Page : 370 pages
File Size : 39,44 MB
Release : 2021-07
Category :
ISBN : 9780578929194

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A non-fiction account of the February 6, 1951 wreck of the Pennsylvania Railroad trains "The Broker" at Woodbridge, New Jersey.

Author : Donna Hogan
Publisher : Phoenix Audio
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 49,34 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781597775403

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Train Wreck: The Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith, is the definitive story of the rise and tragic fall of a woman who became one of the most recognized celebrities in the world because of her voluptuous beauty and her devotion to sex, drugs, money and fame. Donna Hogan, Anna's sister and confidante to Anna and other family members, provides an intimate and mesmerizing view of how her sister broke away from anonymity, poverty and an abusive family, rocketed to fame, and then all-too-soon crashed to her death at the age of 39, weighed down by drugs, alcohol, lawsuits, scandal and the unexpected death of her 20-year-old son, Daniel. Born Vickie Lynn Hogan, she left school in 10th grade, had a son by age 18, became a stripper at 20, and married a billionaire at 26. Vickie transformed herself through plastic surgery and sheer determination into Anna Nicole Smith, Playboys Playmate of the Year in 1993, spokesperson for Guess? Jeans and TrimSpa, and star of The Anna Nicole Show on E! She told everyone that she would be the next Marilyn Monroe and pursued that dream, right to her tragic end. Book jacket.

Author : George Bibel
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 14,82 MB
Release : 2012-11-01
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 1421406527

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Gripping forensic tales explain how and why trains crash. Trains are massive—with some weighing 15,000 tons or more. When these metal monsters collide or go off the rails, their destructive power becomes clear. In this book, George Bibel presents riveting tales of trains gone wrong, the detective work of finding out why, and the safety improvements that were born of tragedy. Train Wreck details numerous crashes, including 17 in which more than 200 people were killed. Readers follow investigators as they sift through the rubble and work with computerized event recorders to figure out what happened. Using a mix of eyewitness accounts and scientific explanations, Bibel draws us into a world of forensics and human drama. Train Wreck is a fascinating exploration of • runaway trains • bearing failures • metal fatigue • crash testing • collision dynamics • bad rails