Free and Bargain Non-Fiction in February 2014

[koland]

We point out free and bargain Non-Fiction titles to each other. Please don't post any self-published books, and please do a search before posting to avoid duplicates.

Be aware that many freebies are only free for a day, so grab them fast!

In case no retailer is specifically mentioned in a post, it is safe to assume it's for Amazon US.

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Fighting Times III: Military Matters Past & Present by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Charles Glass, A J P Taylor and Richard Freeman

Fighting Times is the new military history magazine for soldiers and general readers of history alike.

The third issue features contributions from bestselling historians and well-known authors on a wide range of subjects, including an article on Germanicus: Rome’s most popular general and a piece on Sir Winston Churchill by AJP Taylor, among other articles.

It also includes works of fiction by H C McNeile (A Bulldog Drummond story) and Patrick Mercer (Doctor Watson’s War).

Fighting Times aims to capture both grand strategy and life on the frontline of conflicts past and present in an entertaining and informative manner.

Fighting Times is keen to hear from its readers, whether they be soldiers or military enthusiasts. Please follow us on twitter @Fighting_Times.

This edition includes:

• Churchill and the Navy in the First World War by Richard Freeman
• The War Lords: Churchill by AJP Taylor
• Titans of History: Zhukov (1896-1974) by Simon Sebag Montefiore
• Deserters in the Second World War by Charles Glass
• Kursk: A Reassessment by Robin Cross
• A Good German by Giles MacDonogh
• Germanicus Caesar: Rome's Most Popular General by Lindsay Powell
• An Interview with Anthony Riches, author of The Eagle’s Vengeance
• A Bulldog Drummond Story: ‘In Which the Hun Nation Decreases by One’ by H.C McNeile
• Doctor Watson’s War by Patrick Mercer

Endeavour Press is the UK's leading independent publisher of digital books.

http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Times...dp/B00HCQKTM4/

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Carryover from last month:

Originally Posted by avantman42

This month's free ebook from the University of Chicago Press is I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy by Bob Riesman.

http://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html

[avantman42]

The Field Marshal's Revenge: The Breakdown of a Special Relationship by Charles Whiting

The Field Marshal's Revenge is an enthralling and insightful account of the special relationship between two countries - and two men - during the dramatic final chapters of the Second World War.

Charles Whiting shines the spotlight on Monty and Ike, two charismatic and inspirational commanders who were often ill at ease with each other on both a personal and professional level.

The book encompasses the campaigns, triumphs and tensions of the two men and their armies.

With the conflict all but won in name during the final six months of the war it is clear that peace too would bring its own challenges and contentions. 'The Field Marshal's Revenge' reveals Montgomery's failed attempt to assert Britain's superiority and rights in 1945 as the special relationship, between two great men and two great nations, turned from bad to worse.

Free at Amazon.com and Amazon UK. I haven't checked anywhere else.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by avantman42

The Field Marshal's Revenge: The Breakdown of a Special Relationship by Charles Whiting

Thanks.

Also free from Endeavour

From Boom to Bust: Trial and Error in British Economic Policy (Updated 2013 edition) by David Smith

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FPP6O7I/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00FPP6O7I/

[Pangolin]

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...cm_cd_asin_lnk

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Titans of History
Excellent historian, easy to read and thoroughly researched. Down to a piddling 45p.

[sunnysmiles]

Originally Posted by Pangolin

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B...cm_cd_asin_lnk

Simon Sebag Montefiore: Titans of History
Excellent historian, easy to read and thoroughly researched. Down to a piddling 45p.

Extremely Shallow was very disappointed.

[Pangolin]

Oh phooey really!? I picked it up because I've really enjoyed some of his other books. I then flicked through the T o C and it's true there are a lot of people listed. So more like a series of extended encyclopaedia entries? Oh well, that's cool too.

[Pangolin]

Hmm, yes, I meant the previous books I'd read were well researched and written.

[itisbomb]

Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy
by Eric Metaxas

is $2.99 at Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Bonhoeffer-Pas...rds=bonhoeffer

Below is the blurb
WHO BETTER TO FACE THE GREATEST EVIL OF THE 20TH CENTURY THAN A HUMBLE MAN OF FAITH?

As Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seduced a nation, bullied a continent, and attempted to exterminate the Jews of Europe, a small number of dissidents and saboteurs worked to dismantle the Third Reich from the inside. One of these was Dietrich Bonhoeffer—a pastor and author, known as much for such spiritual classics as The cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as for his 1945 execution in a concentration camp for his part in the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler.

In the first major biography of Bonhoeffer in forty years, New York Times best-selling author Eric Metaxas takes both strands of Bonhoeffer's life?the theologian and the spy?to tell a searing story of incredible moral courage in the face of monstrous evil. In a deeply moving narrative, Metaxas uses previously unavailable documents?including personal letters, detailed journal entries, and firsthand personal accounts?to reveal dimensions of Bonhoeffer's life and theology never before seen.

In Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy?A Righteous Gentiel vs the Third Reich, Metaxas presents the fullest accounting of Bonhoeffer's heart-wrenching 1939 decision to leave the safe haven of America for Hitler's Germany, and using extended excerpts from love letters and coded messages written to and from Bonhoeffer's Cell 92, Metaxas tells for the first time the full story of Bonhoeffer's passionate and tragic romance.

Readers will discover fresh insights and revelations about his life-changing months at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem and about his radical position on why Christians are obliged to stand up for the Jews. Metaxas also sheds new light on Bonhoeffer's reaction to Kristallnacht, his involvement in the famous Valkyrie plot and in "Operation 7," the effort to smuggle Jews into neutral Switzerland.

Bonhoeffer gives witness to one man's extraordinary faith and to the tortured fate of the nation he sought to deliver from the curse of Nazism. It brings the reader face to face with a man determined to do the will of God radically, courageously, and joyfully?even to the point of death. Bonhoeffer is the story of a life framed by a passion for truth and a commitment to justice on behalf of those who face implacable evil.

"Insightful and illuminating, this tome makes a powerful contribution to biography, history and theology." ?Publishers Weekly

"[A] massive and masterful new biography." ?Christianity Today

"Metaxas tells Bonhoeffer's story with passion and theological sophistication." ?Wall Street Journal

"Metaxas magnificently captures the life of theologian and anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer . . . A definitive Bonhoeffer biography for the 21st Century." ?Kirkus

[Little.Egret]

Free everywhere but check before you click

How Wars Begin by A J P Taylor

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I5PB9AM/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00I5PB9AM/

What Did The Romans Do For Us? by Audrey Ward

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00IC8E710/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00IC8E710/

[itisbomb]

The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I
by Stephen Alford

is today's Kindle Daily Deals. It can be downloaded for $1.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Watchers-Secre...2124092&sr=1-1

Below is the blurb:
In a Europe aflame with wars of religion and dynastic conflicts, Elizabeth I came to the throne of a realm encircled by menace. To the great Catholic powers of France and Spain, England was a heretic pariah state, a canker to be cut away for the health of the greater body of Christendom. Elizabeth's government, defending God's true Church of England and its leader, the queen, could stop at nothing to defend itself.Headed by the brilliant, enigmatic, and widely feared Sir Francis Walsingham, the Elizabethan state deployed every dark art: spies, double agents, cryptography, and torture. Delving deeply into sixteenth-century archives, Stephen Alford offers a groundbreaking, chillingly vivid depiction of Elizabethan espionage, literally recovering it from the shadows. In his company we follow Her Majesty's agents through the streets of London and Rome, and into the dank cells of the Tower. We see the world as they saw it-ever unsure who could be trusted or when the fatal knock on their own door might come. The Watchers is a riveting exploration of loyalty, faith, betrayal, and deception with the highest possible stakes, in a world poised between the Middle Ages and modernity.

[scottken]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Free everywhere but check before you click

How Wars Begin by A J P Taylor

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I5PB9AM/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00I5PB9AM/

What Did The Romans Do For Us? by Audrey Ward

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00IC8E710/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00IC8E710/

Thanks for the Taylor, but the Ward book reads like an unspectacular piece of elementary school homework -- literally. It's about 20 pages with clip art photographs and banal statements. The book description gives a sense of it: "It is about what the Romans did for us. For example, I would write something about the straight roads because they invented straight roads."

[bfisher]

Originally Posted by itisbomb

The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I
by Stephen Alford

is today's Kindle Daily Deals. It can be downloaded for $1.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Watchers-Secre...2124092&sr=1-1

I read this recently; an excellent book about the Elizabethan security apparatus.

[itisbomb]

Furies: War in Europe 1450 - 1700
by Lauro Martines

is today's Kindle Daily Deal. It can be downloaded for $1.99.

http://www.amazon.com/Furies-Lauro-M...words=furies#_

Below is the blurb:
During the European Renaissance, an age marked equally by revolutionary thought and constant warfare, it was armies, rather than philosophers, who shaped the modern European nation state. "Mobile cities" of mercenaries and other paid soldiers-made up of astonishingly diverse aggregations of ethnicities and nationalities-marched across the land, looting and savaging enemy territories.In the 15th century, Poland hired German, Spanish, Bohemian, Hungarian, and Scottish soldiers. Later, Sweden fought in Muscovy with Irish, English, Scottish, French and German troops. Units of Croats, Germans, Walloons, Albanians, and especially Swiss served in French armies. In the Netherlands, Italians and Spaniards fought beside Irishmen, Germans, Dalmatians, and Walloons. Regiments of Swiss pikemen fought for Spain, France, and Venice, as well as for German and Italian princes. Companies of Poles, Hungarians, and Croatians fought in German regiments.Growing national economies, unable to pay or feed massed armies for any length of time, thus became war states, an early nationalism which would later consume modern Europe. Furies: War in Europe 1450-1700 by acclaimed historian of the Renaissance Lauro Martines compellingly and simply delivers the story of modern Europe's martial roots, capturing the brutality of early modern war and how it shaped the history of a continent

[itisbomb]

The Ascent of George Washington: The Hidden Political Genius of an American Icon
by John Ferling

is today's Nook Daily Find. It can be downloaded for $1.99.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/asce...9781608191826#

Below is the blurb:
Perhaps the most revered American of all, George Washington has long been considered a stoic leader who held himself above the fray of political infighting. What has gone unnoticed about the much-researched life of Washington is that he was in fact a consummate politician, as historian John Ferling shows in this revealing and provocative new book. As leader of the Continental Army, Washington's keen political savvy enabled him not only to outwit superior British forces, but--even more challenging--to manage the fractious and intrusive Continental Congress. Despite dire setbacks early in the war, Washington deftly outmaneuvered rival generals and defused dissent from officers below him, ending the war with the status of a national icon. His carefully burnished reputation allowed Washington, as president, to lead the country under the guise of non-partisanship for almost all of his eight years in office. Washington, Ferling argues, was not only one of America's most adroit politicians, he was easily the most successful of all time--so successful, in fact, that he is no longer thought of as having been political.

[koland]

Kindle Deal of the Day has more presidential/history books (kids and adult) and the Audible daily deal is also about Lincoln.