Navigating a Life: Henry Bloch in World War II by John Herron and Mary Ann Wynkoop explores how Henry Bloch's wartime experiences molded his character decisively, preparing him to later launch H&R Block, one of the postwar era's major entrepreneurial success stories. As a bomber navigator who defied the odds by surviving dangerous missions over some of Germany's most heavily guarded targets, Bloch learned how to face down fear. In his training before and after combat, especially at the Harvard Business School's Statistical Control Program for military personnel, Bloch further learned how to apply the newest scientific breakthroughs in decision making. Navigating a Life recounts Bloch's service in the U.S. Army Air Force's Ninety-fifth Bomb Group, but readers also glimpse Bloch's life in Kansas City and Michigan before he was called to duty and after the war. Illustrated with personal and historical images, this book shows the challenges that fliers like Bloch faced and why so many lost their lives. Navigating a Life shows how one man finds resilience amid overwhelming challenges. Henry Bloch is the co-founder and chairman emeritus of H&R Block.

Navigating a Life: Henry Bloch in World War II

Biographies & Memoirs

Herron, John

Wynkoop, Mary Ann

Leaders & Notable People

BkMk Press

Poetry. African American Studies. "Mbembe (Milton Smith) was a very fine poet, and he is greatly missed on the contemporary poetry scene. His poems were extremely wellcrafted, sharp-edged, poetic urban snapshots of any city he might find himself in. The language he employed in his poems was on-point, minimal, but always echoed the blues and jazz music that he loved. His time here was brief, but the poems he left us will last."—Quincy Troupe

Mbembe: Selected Poems

Literature & Fiction

Smith, Mbembe Milton

Poetry

Studies on Zone: Poems

Brand, Alice Glarden

Miller Williams selected this book to receive the first John Ciardi Award for Poetry, sponsored by BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Many of these poems explore newly revealed dimensions of the relationship between physical and emotional identity. The book's title, for example, is drawn from the poem "News Item: Man Receives First Hand Transplant": "Our bodies are repaired with metallic/instruments, microscopes, and catheters,/suction hoses and scalpels--/the resurrection machine." Yet the patient also imagines his new hand's "history of touches," wondering to what extent this new hand connects him to the hand's previous physical and emotional existence. This is a timely and thoughtful collection.

The Resurrection Machine: poems

Gehrke, Steve

Poetry. "Dan Jaffe's celebration of jazz is so vivid and passionate I could hear the tunes and see the smoke. It was 3 a.m. and I had no thought of going home until the last note was played. This book is a great work of love" --James Tate.

Playing the Word: Jazz Poems

Jaffé, Dan

Poetry. Writer Debra Di Blasi calls The Feast, "a work of subversive genius, particularly relevant to today's political and cultural climate." Bargen calls this latest work a prose poem sequence, meaning a collection that has the energy, rhythm, and imagery of poetry, while also having the narrative thread and characters of a novella - even if the narrative is held together by a tenuous thread, such as a repeating image. In THE FEAST, the retelling of the biblical Jonah, swallowed by a great fish, becomes the book's underlying organizing principle.

The Feast: poems

Bargen, Walter

Poetry. "Terry Blackhawk's poems, crisp as the first apples of autumn, are tart, knowing, and full of the growth of summer. Poems like these can sustain you. You can read and re-read them, marveling at their construction and arrested by insights you missed the first time which then sneak up on you. Blackhawk's poems make you know, with a touch so light you hardly realize you are being tapped on the shoulder, that you are in the presence of the best poetry: multi-leveled, passionate, varied, thoughtful, intense, and beautiful. ESCAPE ARTIST always conveys the sense that limits and boundaries free us as they define us. It is a harvest of a book, mature work, and its voice carries the zesty suggestion of more poems to come" --Molly Peacock, 2002 Judge, John Ciardi Prize.

Escape Artist: poems

Blackhawk, Terry

Poetry. "The work of a raconteur of the spirit, a splendid storyteller with just enough jaunty language to make you feel you'd want to hear almost anything he had to say. He is elegiac and disciplined, rapturous and suspicious, but more than anything else these are the sort of poems that James Wright once called the poetry of a grown man. I'd add the poems of a remarkable, felicitous intelligence" --Dave Smith.

The Dissolving Island: Poems

Rigsbee, David

Fiction. This collection of short stories explores the inner lives of characters who experience loss from various kinds of tragedy. "I like the solid stories of H. E. Francis and the moreexperimental, 'turned loose' writing that marbles the collection. Thereare haunting characters caught in the web of tight prose"--DianeGlancy, Judge, G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction.

I'll Never Leave You: stories

Francis, H. E.

United States

Fiction. "Lombardo gets everything right, from a sensitive boy's struggle to say and do the right thing in delicate situations to Chicago's impossible weather, as he celebrates the marvels of boyhood and everyday life"--Booklist. "THE LOGIC OF A ROSE is as rich and vital as Bridgeport, the blue-collar Chicago neighborhood in which these stories are set"--Stuart Dybek.

The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories

Lombardo, Billy

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Books by BkMk Press