The Shadows of Power

by James W. Huston

2009 · Harper Collins

Lieutenant Ed Stovic, an F/A-18 pilot, is vectored to intercept Algerians who are defending their newly claimed two-hundred-mile territorial limit. During a dramatic, high-stakes dogfight, the Algerians open fire and Stovic shoots down one of the Algerians' MiGs, its pilot tumbling to a fiery death in the Mediterranean. Stovic is hailed as a hero, and he sees this as the perfect moment to help him achieve his life-long dream—flying with the world-famous Blue Angels, the Navy's elite flight demonstration team. Ismael Nezzar, the brother of the deceased Algerian pilot, is in the U.S. on a student visa. He sees the boastful Stovic on the Today show and is enraged by his glibness. While attending his brother's funeral—the biggest event in Algeria in a decade—Ismael is coerced by a group of Islamic radicals to seek revenge for his brother's death. Though he withdrew from the powerful group years before, Ismael is filled with fury and will stop at nothing to destroy Stovic. Unknown to either of these two men, Kent Rathman has been assigned by a highly placed government official to watch them. Working in the shadows, Rat moves easily among government agencies and is ordered by his White House contacts—including the President and the NSA director, who has plans to bring about a change of power on her own—to stop the Algerian. To save his country and his friend, Rat must devise a brilliant counterstrike—a mission in which failure means certain death. Packed with deadly intrigue, Beltway power plays, and high-flying adventure, The Shadows of Power is Huston's most exciting novel yet. Combining his knowledge of how things work in Washington with his expertise on military hardware, Huston has written an electrifyingly realistic tale of international terrorism and American triumph.

Overcoming Matthew Arnold

by James Walter Caufield

2016 · Routledge

Opening the way for a reexamination of Matthew Arnold's unique contributions to ethical criticism, James Walter Caufield emphasizes the central role of philosophical pessimism in Arnold's master tropes of "culture" and "conduct." Caufield uses Arnold's ethics as a lens through which to view key literary and cultural movements of the past 150 years, demonstrating that Arnoldian conduct is grounded in a Victorian ethic of "renouncement," a form of altruism that wholly informs both Arnold's poetry and prose and sets him apart from the many nineteenth-century public moralists. Arnold's thought is situated within a cultural and philosophical context that shows the continuing relevance of "renouncement" to much contemporary ethical reflection, from the political kenosis of Giorgio Agamben and the pensiero debole of Gianni Vattimo, to the ethical criticism of Wayne C. Booth and Martha Nussbaum. In refocusing attention on Arnold's place within the broad history of critical and social thought, Caufield returns the poet and critic to his proper place as a founding father of modern cultural criticism.