Free (Kindle KDP) The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century [Science Biography]

ATDrake · 04-08-2012, 12:33 PM

Slushpile-wise, we have a real treat in there today, and also some pretty decent stuff amidst the standard 90% crap observable via Sturgeon's Law.

I've said this before and I'll say it again:

If you do not already know who Nikola Tesla is and you live in a modern technological milieu filled with alternating-current electricity which is less likely to randomly kill you via over-electrocution like an Edisonian publicity elephant should you have a household accident, and shock jock talk radio programmes beamed into space which will one day bring offended aliens down upon our heads in a few thousand years' time once they've received the signals, and so many other things, you are grossly and profoundly and really, rather embarrassingly unconversant with the underpinnings of the very world you live in which has been made possible by this man and allow you to see this post at all, and should slap yourself with some steampunk novels before going on to remedy your shame.

Fortunately, this will be relatively easy for you to do today and you will no longer have to wallow in such appalling ignorance any more.

The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century by Robert Lomas was originally published by Hodder's Headline imprint in 1999 and is a biography of Exactly What It Says in the Title.

Lomas actually seems to have written mainly Templar/Freemasonry/other conspiracy-theory type books rather than being a dedicated science history writer, but his Tesla bio has praise from a number of Engineering and Technology-related outlets as a pleasantly light introductory read which will whet your appetite for one of the better and more in-depth biographies, such as Margaret Cheney's Man out of Time (I've read this, and it's recommended).

The author also says he's included more illustrations in the Kindle version than appeared in the print edition, for lack of space.

Free (DRMed) for who knows how long @ Amazon main UK DE ES FR IT

Description
Everybody knows that Thomas Edison devised electric light and domestic electricity supplies, that Guglielmo Marconi thought up radio and George Westinghouse built the world's first hydro-electric power station. Everybody knows these 'facts' but they are wrong.

The man who dreamt up these things also invented, inter-alia, the fluorescent light, seismology, a worldwide data communications network and a mechanical laxative. His name was Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American scientist, and his is without doubt this century's greatest unsung scientific hero.

His life story is an extraordinary series of scientific triumphs followed by a catalog of personal disasters. Perpetually unlucky and exploited by everyone around him, credit for Tesla's work was appropriated by several of the West's most famous entrepreneurs: Edison, Westinghouse and Marconi among them. After his death, information about Tesla was deliberately suppressed by the FBI.

Using Tesla's own writings, contemporary records, court transcripts and recently released FBI files, The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century pieces together for the first time the true extent of Tesla's scientific genius and tells the amazing tale of how his name came to be so widely forgotten.

Nikola Tesla is the engineer who gave his name to the unit of magnetic flux. The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century. Robert's biography of his childhood hero was launched at the 1999 Orkney Science Festival, where Robert gave a talk on Tesla in conjunction with Andrej Detela from the Department of Low and Medium Energy Physics at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubijana, Slovenia.

If the Tesla thing hadn't popped up, I probably would have given the title feature nod to the following, even though I don't read or even really care about horror.

Theatre Macabre by Bram Stoker Award-winnning Irish writer Kealan Patrick Burke (ISFDB, Wikipedia) is a collection of his short horror stories, many if not all of them previously published in various outlets, and which has a really nice cover.

He also offers free for today his actual Stoker award-winning short, which originally appeared as a chapbook.

Free without DRM for who knows how long @ Amazon main UK DE ES FR IT

Description (there's a list of the contents in the full blurb)
A hooded figure wanders a lonesome road waiting for a special someone...A criminal returns home to face old memories and new nightmares...A man awakes to find himself living in a mirror image of reality...and diners at a restaurant find themselves confronted with a terrifying revelation about who and what they are...These are the nineteen nightmarish tales that await you in the THEATER MACABRE...

The Turtle Boy (The Timmy Quinn Series (Book One)) is the aforementioned Stoker winner @ Amazon main UK DE ES FR IT

Descripton (first paragraph only, if you're interested, you'll click through to see the rest)
Available for the first time on Amazon Kindle, Kealan Patrick Burke's Bram Stoker Award-winning coming of age story The Turtle Boy.

Burke has also got a few other things free today, but they're either repeats or stuff where he lent a hand to some newbie writer: Linkage for the lot

The rest of the things of the KDP exclusive-or-else-but-you-get-5-days-free-out-of-90-during-which-nobody-will-see-your-book-because-everyone-else-is-also-getting-5-days-free slushpile which I bothered to look at which more-or-less-checked-out, known repeats skipped, though I'll mention the more interesting ones at the bottom for people who missed stuff.

Methuen-published UK writer Paul Henke returns with a 2000 small-pressed military/conspiracy action/adventure thriller: Mayhem (Nick Hunter Series)

St. Martin's/Minotaur-published I.J. Parker returns with another one in her series of Japanese historical sleuth mysteries, this one not linked to a paperback but I'm not going to dig since the series has been picked up by Severn House in the meantime: Death on an Autumn River (A Sugawara Akitada Novel)

Fellow MR member author Maryann Miller, who has been published by Five Star, IIRC, has a YA out from Books We Love/BWLPP: Friends Forever

Harlequin or Bantam-published-I-forget-which Betty Jo Schuler has a contemporary maybe-YA romance also out from Books We Love: Heart Strings Books We Love/BWLPP are also running a mix of other new and repeats if you search on their imprints, including some thrillers from fellow MR member author Joan Hall Hovey if you missed them earlier.

Tee Morris & Pip Ballantine, who write th e Ministry of Peculiar Occurences steampunk series out from HarperCollins, team up to bring you "a steampunk fairy tale": Aladdin and His Wonderfully Infernal Device

John R. Maxim returns with a 1986 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt psychological suspense/maybe-conspiracy thriller with historical and supernatural elements: Time Out Of Mind (The Bannerman Series)

Ellora's Cave-published Brenna Lyons offers you two installments in a 2003 small-pressed supernatural romantic suspense (maybe erotic) series: Linkage for them both

Shannon Donnelly, who's been included here before but I forget which romance imprint published her, offers two more of her historical romances, one of which she says is "not for everyone" and "more historical novel than historical romance, but it's more romance than historical novel" when warning potentially-disappointed readers: Linkage for them both

Lee Chambers claims to be an award-winning writer/director with a movie due out based on his debut YA crime thriller, and IMDB does at least yields four people with his exact name, one of whom is listed as being a "writer", so: The Pineville Heist

Brett Dakin's travelogue/expat memoir came out from Asia Books in 2003, and he quotes a bunch of blurb praise from Asia-Pacific newspapers (some of them the prominent English-language ones which are the major Anglophone news sources in those communities) and Lonely Planet guidebook writers: Another Quiet American: Stories of Life in Laos

Newbie small imprint Big Sky Publishing has a bunch of non-fiction freebies of various seriousness on the subject of the Australian military forces and history, and some other assorted non-fic: Linkage for the lot

Ken Brosky doesn't have an ISFDB entry, but he does something which I approve of, which is list beside each of his stories which ones have been previously "published", and the name of the outlet (presumably very small press or online magazines) where it appeared. Since I would like to encourage authors to do this instead of just claiming vague "award-winning bestseller who has appeared in various outlets including maybe one named one with the story not specified", I hereby include his collection of sf & horror shorts: Abandon Stories

Hey kids, more science! If you've been picking these things up, David Wooster, PhD, returns with another thrilling and educational installment of: Cystic Fibrosis & the Brewer's Yeast: A Microbiology Tale and repeats The Secret Life of Water: A Microbiology Tale if you missed it earlier.

I suppose having a holiday based upon resurrection would bring out all the undead for: Zombie Easter This one actually admits in the blurb that despite a kid-centred storyline, it is not actually recommended for reading to your kids.

Litfic, sfnal, mystery backlist repeats from Jessica Barksdale Inclan, David B. Riley (which has a dinosaur on the cover), Suzanne Tyrpak, Mary Anna Evans, and Lawrence R. Gustin's academic history of Buick automobiles is free again.

Happy reading, if indeed you manage to spot something you think you might like, or manage to learn something useful about life-underpinning inventions and/or microbiology.

Synamon · 04-08-2012, 01:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ATDrake

St. Martin's/Minotaur-published I.J. Parker returns with another one in her series of Japanese historical sleuth mysteries, this one not linked to a paperback but I'm not going to dig since the series has been picked up by Severn House in the meantime: Death on an Autumn River (A Sugawara Akitada Novel)

This is the 9th in the series and earlier books published by Penguin got starred reviews from Publisher Weekly.

Woohoo on the Tesla bio!

DrNefario · 04-08-2012, 01:19 PM

I hope those I J Parker books are good. I keep picking them up, but haven't managed to read any, yet.

OddCosine · 04-08-2012, 02:20 PM

Wow, I must really be in the mood for free books today. I picked up a ton of these. Nice selection, thanks!

dreams · 04-08-2012, 03:14 PM

Thank you! I love stories about Tesla. I also went looking when you mentioned "David B. Riley (which has a dinosaur on the cover)" and just had to grab the freebies with interesting sounding plots. I hope they are good.

Spoiler:

RDaneel54 · 04-08-2012, 05:14 PM

Thanks for another book lead, the Tesla book looks interesting.

Dean

plib · 04-08-2012, 06:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ATDrake

If you do not already know who Nikola Tesla is and you live in a modern technological milieu filled with alternating-current electricity which is less likely to randomly kill you via over-electrocution like an Edisonian publicity elephant should you have a household accident, and shock jock talk radio programmes beamed into space which will one day bring offended aliens down upon our heads in a few thousand years' time once they've received the signals, and so many other things, you are grossly and profoundly and really, rather embarrassingly unconversant with the underpinnings of the very world you live in which has been made possible by this man and allow you to see this post at all, and should slap yourself with some steampunk novels before going on to remedy your shame.

It may be on a topic of science, but that's a sentence worthy of a lawyer!

P.S. Thanks for the many listings you post, they've steered me to enough downloads to keep me busy for a long time.

GA Russell · 04-08-2012, 08:12 PM

Thanks for the Tesla AT!

04-08-2012, 12:33 PM	#1
ATDrake Wizzard Posts: 11,517 Karma: 33048258 Join Date: Mar 2010 Location: Roundworld Device: Kindle 2 International, Sony PRS-T1, BlackBerry PlayBook, Acer Iconia	Free (Kindle KDP) The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century [Science Biography] Slushpile-wise, we have a real treat in there today, and also some pretty decent stuff amidst the standard 90% crap observable via Sturgeon's Law. I've said this before and I'll say it again: If you do not already know who Nikola Tesla is and you live in a modern technological milieu filled with alternating-current electricity which is less likely to randomly kill you via over-electrocution like an Edisonian publicity elephant should you have a household accident, and shock jock talk radio programmes beamed into space which will one day bring offended aliens down upon our heads in a few thousand years' time once they've received the signals, and so many other things, you are grossly and profoundly and really, rather embarrassingly unconversant with the underpinnings of the very world you live in which has been made possible by this man and allow you to see this post at all, and should slap yourself with some steampunk novels before going on to remedy your shame. Fortunately, this will be relatively easy for you to do today and you will no longer have to wallow in such appalling ignorance any more. The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century by Robert Lomas was originally published by Hodder's Headline imprint in 1999 and is a biography of Exactly What It Says in the Title. Lomas actually seems to have written mainly Templar/Freemasonry/other conspiracy-theory type books rather than being a dedicated science history writer, but his Tesla bio has praise from a number of Engineering and Technology-related outlets as a pleasantly light introductory read which will whet your appetite for one of the better and more in-depth biographies, such as Margaret Cheney's Man out of Time (I've read this, and it's recommended). The author also says he's included more illustrations in the Kindle version than appeared in the print edition, for lack of space. Free (DRMed) for who knows how long @ Amazon main UK DE ES FR IT Description Everybody knows that Thomas Edison devised electric light and domestic electricity supplies, that Guglielmo Marconi thought up radio and George Westinghouse built the world's first hydro-electric power station. Everybody knows these 'facts' but they are wrong. The man who dreamt up these things also invented, inter-alia, the fluorescent light, seismology, a worldwide data communications network and a mechanical laxative. His name was Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American scientist, and his is without doubt this century's greatest unsung scientific hero. His life story is an extraordinary series of scientific triumphs followed by a catalog of personal disasters. Perpetually unlucky and exploited by everyone around him, credit for Tesla's work was appropriated by several of the West's most famous entrepreneurs: Edison, Westinghouse and Marconi among them. After his death, information about Tesla was deliberately suppressed by the FBI. Using Tesla's own writings, contemporary records, court transcripts and recently released FBI files, The Man who Invented the Twentieth Century pieces together for the first time the true extent of Tesla's scientific genius and tells the amazing tale of how his name came to be so widely forgotten. Nikola Tesla is the engineer who gave his name to the unit of magnetic flux. The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century. Robert's biography of his childhood hero was launched at the 1999 Orkney Science Festival, where Robert gave a talk on Tesla in conjunction with Andrej Detela from the Department of Low and Medium Energy Physics at the Jozef Stefan Institute in Ljubijana, Slovenia. If the Tesla thing hadn't popped up, I probably would have given the title feature nod to the following, even though I don't read or even really care about horror. Theatre Macabre by Bram Stoker Award-winnning Irish writer Kealan Patrick Burke (ISFDB, Wikipedia) is a collection of his short horror stories, many if not all of them previously published in various outlets, and which has a really nice cover. He also offers free for today his actual Stoker award-winning short, which originally appeared as a chapbook. Free without DRM for who knows how long @ Amazon main UK DE ES FR IT Description (there's a list of the contents in the full blurb) A hooded figure wanders a lonesome road waiting for a special someone...A criminal returns home to face old memories and new nightmares...A man awakes to find himself living in a mirror image of reality...and diners at a restaurant find themselves confronted with a terrifying revelation about who and what they are...These are the nineteen nightmarish tales that await you in the THEATER MACABRE... The Turtle Boy (The Timmy Quinn Series (Book One)) is the aforementioned Stoker winner @ Amazon main UK DE ES FR IT Descripton (first paragraph only, if you're interested, you'll click through to see the rest) Available for the first time on Amazon Kindle, Kealan Patrick Burke's Bram Stoker Award-winning coming of age story The Turtle Boy. Burke has also got a few other things free today, but they're either repeats or stuff where he lent a hand to some newbie writer: Linkage for the lot The rest of the things of the KDP exclusive-or-else-but-you-get-5-days-free-out-of-90-during-which-nobody-will-see-your-book-because-everyone-else-is-also-getting-5-days-free slushpile which I bothered to look at which more-or-less-checked-out, known repeats skipped, though I'll mention the more interesting ones at the bottom for people who missed stuff. Methuen-published UK writer Paul Henke returns with a 2000 small-pressed military/conspiracy action/adventure thriller: Mayhem (Nick Hunter Series) St. Martin's/Minotaur-published I.J. Parker returns with another one in her series of Japanese historical sleuth mysteries, this one not linked to a paperback but I'm not going to dig since the series has been picked up by Severn House in the meantime: Death on an Autumn River (A Sugawara Akitada Novel) Fellow MR member author Maryann Miller, who has been published by Five Star, IIRC, has a YA out from Books We Love/BWLPP: Friends Forever Harlequin or Bantam-published-I-forget-which Betty Jo Schuler has a contemporary maybe-YA romance also out from Books We Love: Heart Strings Books We Love/BWLPP are also running a mix of other new and repeats if you search on their imprints, including some thrillers from fellow MR member author Joan Hall Hovey if you missed them earlier. Tee Morris & Pip Ballantine, who write th e Ministry of Peculiar Occurences steampunk series out from HarperCollins, team up to bring you "a steampunk fairy tale": Aladdin and His Wonderfully Infernal Device John R. Maxim returns with a 1986 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt psychological suspense/maybe-conspiracy thriller with historical and supernatural elements: Time Out Of Mind (The Bannerman Series) Ellora's Cave-published Brenna Lyons offers you two installments in a 2003 small-pressed supernatural romantic suspense (maybe erotic) series: Linkage for them both Shannon Donnelly, who's been included here before but I forget which romance imprint published her, offers two more of her historical romances, one of which she says is "not for everyone" and "more historical novel than historical romance, but it's more romance than historical novel" when warning potentially-disappointed readers: Linkage for them both Lee Chambers claims to be an award-winning writer/director with a movie due out based on his debut YA crime thriller, and IMDB does at least yields four people with his exact name, one of whom is listed as being a "writer", so: The Pineville Heist Brett Dakin's travelogue/expat memoir came out from Asia Books in 2003, and he quotes a bunch of blurb praise from Asia-Pacific newspapers (some of them the prominent English-language ones which are the major Anglophone news sources in those communities) and Lonely Planet guidebook writers: Another Quiet American: Stories of Life in Laos Newbie small imprint Big Sky Publishing has a bunch of non-fiction freebies of various seriousness on the subject of the Australian military forces and history, and some other assorted non-fic: Linkage for the lot Ken Brosky doesn't have an ISFDB entry, but he does something which I approve of, which is list beside each of his stories which ones have been previously "published", and the name of the outlet (presumably very small press or online magazines) where it appeared. Since I would like to encourage authors to do this instead of just claiming vague "award-winning bestseller who has appeared in various outlets including maybe one named one with the story not specified", I hereby include his collection of sf & horror shorts: Abandon Stories Hey kids, more science! If you've been picking these things up, David Wooster, PhD, returns with another thrilling and educational installment of: Cystic Fibrosis & the Brewer's Yeast: A Microbiology Tale and repeats The Secret Life of Water: A Microbiology Tale if you missed it earlier. I suppose having a holiday based upon resurrection would bring out all the undead for: Zombie Easter This one actually admits in the blurb that despite a kid-centred storyline, it is not actually recommended for reading to your kids. Litfic, sfnal, mystery backlist repeats from Jessica Barksdale Inclan, David B. Riley (which has a dinosaur on the cover), Suzanne Tyrpak, Mary Anna Evans, and Lawrence R. Gustin's academic history of Buick automobiles is free again. Happy reading, if indeed you manage to spot something you think you might like, or manage to learn something useful about life-underpinning inventions and/or microbiology.

04-08-2012, 03:14 PM	#5
dreams It's about the umbrella Posts: 25,110 Karma: 56250158 Join Date: Jan 2009 Device: Sony 505\| K Fire \| KK 3G+Wi-Fi \| iPhone 3Gs \|Vista 32-bit Hm Prem w/FF	Thank you! I love stories about Tesla. I also went looking when you mentioned "David B. Riley (which has a dinosaur on the cover)" and just had to grab the freebies with interesting sounding plots. I hope they are good. Spoiler: The Brotherhood by David B. Riley and Laura Givens - "In an out of the way winery in central Oregon a small band of monks guard a very dark secret--they're vampires. " Science Fiction Trails 7 by David B. Riley, David B. Riley and Laura Givens - "For readers who enjoy reading steampunk stories, the ones in this latest issue of Science Fiction Trails runs along similar lines except David B. Riley's chosen selection of stories are also featured in the Wild West of old - Sandra Scholes, SF Site" Showdown at Midnight by Don D'Ammassa, Joel Jenkins, M. H. Bonham and Jennifer Campbell-Hicks - "Join us as we travel the trails and byways of the Wild West. Along the way, keep your eyes peeled for ghosts robbing trains, haunted mines, bounty hunters from hell, zombie gunfighters, ghost horses, a sword out for revenge, some bats up to no good and maybe even a werewolf or two. The west is wilder and weirder than ever.." The Devil Draws Two by David B. Riley and Laura Givens - "In 1880, Ah Puch, an evil Mayan god, is determined to take over the State of California and turn it into his own personal empire. Vagabond barber turned lawman Miles O’Malley is determined to stop him. Along the way, Miles is frequently distracted by run ins with everything from shipwrecked ghosts to sea monsters to little green men in flying saucers. To further complicate his life he is befriended by some very sexy fallen angels who can cause him even more trouble. The west was never this wild! "

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04-08-2012, 01:19 PM	#3
DrNefario Wizard Posts: 2,201 Karma: 12029046 Join Date: Jan 2012 Location: UK Device: Kindle, Kobo Touch, Nook SimpleTouch	I hope those I J Parker books are good. I keep picking them up, but haven't managed to read any, yet.

04-08-2012, 02:20 PM	#4
OddCosine Connoisseur Posts: 91 Karma: 1186533 Join Date: Jan 2012 Device: Kindle	Wow, I must really be in the mood for free books today. I picked up a ton of these. Nice selection, thanks!

04-08-2012, 05:14 PM	#6
RDaneel54 Aging Positronic Brain Posts: 633 Karma: 2155452 Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: Aurora (when off-Earth) Device: Amazon Oasis; iPhone, iPad Mini	Thanks for another book lead, the Tesla book looks interesting. Dean

04-08-2012, 08:12 PM	#8
GA Russell Stampeders are hot! Posts: 7,690 Karma: 31487351 Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Raleigh, NC Device: Paperwhite, Kindles 10 & 4 and jetBook Lite	Thanks for the Tesla AT!

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