FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[Little.Egret]

Endeavour, free

The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford by Arthur Mizener


‘Ford Madox Ford wrote eighty-one books during his life, thirty-two of them novels...Every one of them shows something about a human imagination perhaps not radically different from other men’s but made to seem so by being revealed to us in unusual detail by these books, and every one of them helps us to understand the process by which Ford slowly learned to reveal his imagination.’

Ford Madox Ford is a legendary figure who, like his friends James Joyce and Ezra Pound, came close to the very centre of modern literature.

He wrote the masterpieces The Good Soldier and Parade’s End, collaborated extensively with Joseph Conrad, and was the first editor of Finnegans Wake.

First published in the United Kingdom in 1971 by Harper & Row.


Arthur Mizener (1907-1988) was a professor of English at Cornell University. As well as his biography of Ford Madox Ford, he also wrote one of writer F Scott Fitzgerald.


https://www.amazon.com/Saddest-Story...dp/B0187S1KNW/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Saddest-Sto...dp/B0187S1KNW/

https://www.amazon.ca/Saddest-Story-...dp/B0187S1KNW/

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Charles River Editors, Free

Apollo and Artemis: The Origins and History of the Twin Deities in Ancient Greek Mythology

British India: The History and Legacy of the British Raj and the Partition of India and Pakistan into Separate Nations

Island Hopping across the Pacific Theater in World War II: The History of America’s Victorious Leapfrogging Strategy against Imperial Japan

The Six Day War: The History and Legacy of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and Its Impact on the Middle East

Mysterious North America: Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena across the United States, Mexico, and Canada

The Mysterious British Isles: A Collection of Mysteries, Legends, and Unexplained Phenomena across Britain and Ireland


https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search...+river+editors

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?url=sear...+river+editors

https://www.amazon.ca/s/?url=search-...+river+editors


England’s Most Famous Palaces: The History of Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace

The Canaanites and Philistines: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Israelites’ Enemies in the Land that Became Israel

Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata: The Lives and Legacies of Mexico’s Most Famous Revolutionaries

The Defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I: The History of the Allied Victories that Led to the Collapse of the Turkish Empire

Add

The Roman Army: The History and Legacy of the Military that Revolutionized Ancient Warfare and Made Rome a Global Empire

East Germany: The History and Legacy of the Soviet Satellite State Established after World War II

Kim Il-sung: The Controversial Life and Legacy of North Korea’s First Supreme Leader

The Nag Hammadi Library: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Gnostic Texts Rediscovered in the 20th Century

[Little.Egret]

Free


Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918 - 1929 (Harriman) by Michael David-Fox

Cornell University Press, May 2016

Using archival materials never previously accessible to Western scholars, Michael David-Fox analyzes Bolshevik Party educational and research initiatives in higher learning after 1917.

His fresh consideration of the era of the New Economic Policy and cultural politics after the Revolution explains how new communist institutions rose to parallel and rival conventional higher learning from the Academy of Sciences to the universities.
Beginning with the creation of the first party school by intellectuals on the island of Capri in 1909, David-Fox argues, the Bolshevik cultural project was tightly linked to party educational institutions.
He provides the first account of the early history and politics of three major institutions founded after the Revolution: Sverdlov Communist University, where the quest to transform everyday life gripped the student movement; the Institute of Red Professors, where the Bolsheviks sought to train a new communist intellectual or red specialist; and the Communist Academy, headquarters for a planned, collectivist, proletarian science.

Michael David-Fox is Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of History at Georgetown University and a founding and executive editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies. He is the author of several books, most recently Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N28IT9J

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01N28IT9J

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01N28IT9J

[ReadingManiac]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Free


Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918 - 1929 (Harriman) by Michael David-Fox

Cornell University Press, May 2016

Using archival materials never previously accessible to Western scholars, Michael David-Fox analyzes Bolshevik Party educational and research initiatives in higher learning after 1917.

His fresh consideration of the era of the New Economic Policy and cultural politics after the Revolution explains how new communist institutions rose to parallel and rival conventional higher learning from the Academy of Sciences to the universities.
Beginning with the creation of the first party school by intellectuals on the island of Capri in 1909, David-Fox argues, the Bolshevik cultural project was tightly linked to party educational institutions.
He provides the first account of the early history and politics of three major institutions founded after the Revolution: Sverdlov Communist University, where the quest to transform everyday life gripped the student movement; the Institute of Red Professors, where the Bolsheviks sought to train a new communist intellectual or red specialist; and the Communist Academy, headquarters for a planned, collectivist, proletarian science.

Michael David-Fox is Professor in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and Department of History at Georgetown University and a founding and executive editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian Studies. He is the author of several books, most recently Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N28IT9J

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01N28IT9J

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01N28IT9J

Wow! You do find some treasures!

[Fluribus]

A magisterial biography of the King of Pop's grandfather. Abridged by the author from his 3 volume work.

Robert V. Remini The Life of Andrew Jackson for $0.99 at Amazon.com.

[astrangerhere]

In the US Kindle Store Joan Didion's essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem is only $1.99 right now. All of her other books are around $10USD.

From the description:

Capturing the tumultuous landscape of the United States, and in particular California, during a pivotal era of social change, the first work of nonfiction from one of American literature’s most distinctive prose stylists is a modern classic.

In twenty razor-sharp essays that redefined the art of journalism, National Book Award–winning author Joan Didion reports on a society gripped by a deep generational divide, from the “misplaced children” dropping acid in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district to Hollywood legend John Wayne filming his first picture after a bout with cancer. She paints indelible portraits of reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes and folk singer Joan Baez, “a personality before she was entirely a person,” and takes readers on eye-opening journeys to Death Valley, Hawaii, and Las Vegas, “the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements.”

First published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been heralded by the New York Times Book Review as “a rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country” and named to Time magazine’s list of the one hundred best and most influential nonfiction books. It is the definitive account of a terrifying and transformative decade in American history whose discordant reverberations continue to sound a half-century later.

[ATDrake]

Bargain @ $1.99 each on non-fiction books about J. R. R. Tolkien and the effects of WWI upon his writing, in US and one also in Canada (price should be the same at the usual retailers):

Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by Tolkien scholar John Garth, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Geo-restricted to US-only (HarperCollins has the rights elsewhere), but couponable/VIP-discount eligible @ Kobo US. This won him the 2004 Mythopoeic Scholarship Award.

“To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 . . . by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” So J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology into life. It shows how, after two of these brilliant young men were killed, Tolkien pursued the dream they had all shared by launching his epic of good and evil.

This is the first substantially new biography of Tolkien since 1977, meticulously researched and distilled from his personal wartime papers and a multitude of other sources. John Garth argues that the foundation of tragic experience in the First World War is the key to Middle-earth's enduring power. Tolkien used his mythic imagination not to escape from reality but to reflect and transform the cataclysm of his generation. While his contemporaries surrendered to disillusionment, he kept enchantment alive, reshaping an entire literary tradition into a form that resonates to this day.

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18 by Joseph Loconte, an associate professor of history at The King's College in New York City. Here's an op-ed article by him about Tolkien and WWI over @ the New York Times. This one is out from HarperCollins' Zondervan imprint, which is a dedicated Christian house they acquired at some point, but may still be of interest to secular fans curious about the religious aspects of their works.

The untold story of how the First World War shaped the lives, faith, and writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

The First World War laid waste to a continent and permanently altered the political and religious landscape of the West. For a generation of men and women, it brought the end of innocence—and the end of faith. Yet for J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, the Great War deepened their spiritual quest. Both men served as soldiers on the Western Front, survived the trenches, and used the experience of that conflict to ignite their Christian imagination. Had there been no Great War, there would have been no*Hobbit*, no *Lord of the Rings*, no *Narnia*, and perhaps no conversion to Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

Unlike a generation of young writers who lost faith in the God of the Bible, Tolkien and Lewis produced epic stories infused with the themes of guilt and grace, sorrow and consolation. Giving an unabashedly Christian vision of hope in a world tortured by doubt and disillusionment, the two writers created works that changed the course of literature and shaped the faith of millions. This is the first book to explore their work in light of the spiritual crisis sparked by the conflict.

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Bargain @ $1.99 each on non-fiction books about J. R. R. Tolkien and the effects of WWI upon his writing, in US and one also in Canada (price should be the same at the usual retailers):

Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth by Tolkien scholar John Garth, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Geo-restricted to US-only (HarperCollins has the rights elsewhere)

{. . .}

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18 by Joseph Loconte, an associate professor of history at The King's College in New York City. Here's an op-ed article by him about Tolkien and WWI over @ the New York Times. This one is out from HarperCollins' Zondervan imprint, which is a dedicated Christian house they acquired at some point, but may still be of interest to secular fans curious about the religious aspects of their works.

The untold story of how the First World War shaped the lives, faith, and writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

The First World War laid waste to a continent and permanently altered the political and religious landscape of the West. For a generation of men and women, it brought the end of innocence—and the end of faith. Yet for J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, the Great War deepened their spiritual quest. Both men served as soldiers on the Western Front, survived the trenches, and used the experience of that conflict to ignite their Christian imagination. Had there been no Great War, there would have been no*Hobbit*, no *Lord of the Rings*, no *Narnia*, and perhaps no conversion to Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

Unlike a generation of young writers who lost faith in the God of the Bible, Tolkien and Lewis produced epic stories infused with the themes of guilt and grace, sorrow and consolation. Giving an unabashedly Christian vision of hope in a world tortured by doubt and disillusionment, the two writers created works that changed the course of literature and shaped the faith of millions. This is the first book to explore their work in light of the spiritual crisis sparked by the conflict.

The latter is available in UK for £1.99

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/a-h...nd-a-great-war

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hobbit-Ward...dp/B00PWOH1EM/

[Little.Egret]

Charles River Editors, Free

Ur and Uruk: The History and Legacy of the Ancient Sumerians’ Two Most Important Cities

Hercules & Jason and the Argonauts: The Legendary Stories of Ancient Greece’s Most Famous Heroes

Tiwanaku and Puma Punku: The History and Legacy of South America’s Most Famous Ancient Holy Site

The Advent of Early Modern Warfare: The History of the Transition from Medieval Military Tactics to the Age of Gunpowder

The Dutch East India Company and British East India Company: The History and Legacy of the World’s Most Famous Colonial Trade Companies

The Astors: The History and Legacy of One of the World’s Wealthiest Families

World War I on the Ground: The History and Legacy of Life in the Trenches

The Most Infamous Terrorist Groups in the World: The History and Legacy of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Nusra Front, and Boko Haram


https://www.amazon.com/s/?url=search...+river+editors

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/?url=sear...+river+editors

https://www.amazon.ca/s/?url=search-...+river+editors

[ATDrake]

X-link to the DRM-free thread for some new bundles:

Humble Book Bundle Network Security & Certification presented by Wiley consists of mostly highly-specialized technical training computer books for professionals.

The Winter Wonderland Game Bundle contains non-fiction books about (mostly video) games and the gaming industry. There's genre history, creator interviews, developer inspiration stuff, classic game retrospectives, and a rather interesting-looking book by a professional game translator about localizations, with examples of selected translations from real video games, explaining choices made due to cultural differences and other factors.

[Little.Egret]

Free

A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward by Sheridan Morley

Noel Coward, ‘the master’, is one of the most remarkable figures in the history of twentieth century entertainment. Prodigiously talented, he blazed a trail through theatre, film and song on both sides of the Atlantic. In the theatre he wrote hit plays like The Vortex, Private Lives, Hay Fever, Cavalcade and Blithe Spirit. On film he wrote the war classic In Which We Serve and the timeless love story Brief Encounter. His songs, which number into the hundreds, include ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, ‘I’ll See You Again’, ‘A Room with a View’, ‘The Stately Homes of England’ and ‘Mrs Worthington’.

His greatest creation may even have been himself – what Time called ‘a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise’. This led to his increasing celebrity on American television in the 1950s and in a series of wildly successful one-man shows in Las Vegas, not to mention his popularity as a character actor in the last decade of his life.

He married his first wife, Margaret Gudejko, in 1965, and they had three children together. He married his second wife, Ruth Leon, in 1995.

Sheridan Morley authored a number of books including A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward (1969); Gladys Cooper (1979); The Hollywood Raj (1983), The Other Side of the Moon: The Life of David Niven (1985), Odd Man Out: James Mason (1989) and Robert: My Father (1993). These are now all republished by Dean Street Press.


https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Amuse-...dp/B01KU3U1VE/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Talent-Amus...dp/B01KU3U1VE/

https://www.amazon.ca/Talent-Amuse-L...dp/B01KU3U1VE/

[AnemicOak]

Open Road has a couple of sale titles for Pearl Harbor Day, links are to Amazon, but prices should be good at most US retailers...


December 7, 1941: The Day the Japanese Attacked Pearl Harbor by Gordon W. Prange -- $2.99

A minute-by-minute account of the morning that brought America into World War II, by the New York Times–bestselling authors of At Dawn We Slept.

When dawn broke over Hawaii on December 7, 1941, no one suspected that America was only minutes from war. By nightfall, the naval base at Pearl Harbor was a smoldering ruin, and over 2,000 Americans lay dead. December 7, 1941 gives a detailed and immersive real-time account of that fateful morning.

In or out of uniform, every witness responded differently when the first Japanese bombs began to fall. A chaplain fled his post and spent a week in hiding, while mess hall workers seized a machine gun and began returning fire. Some officers were taken unawares, while others responded valiantly, rallying their men to fight back and in some cases sacrificing their lives. Built around eyewitness accounts, this book provides an unprecedented glimpse of how it felt to be at Pearl Harbor on the day that would live in infamy.

Sunday in Hell: Pearl Harbor Minute by Minute by Bill McWilliams -- $1.99

Using long-established historical records and contemporary journals, as well as recently released wartime documents, Bill McWilliams has created a brand-new minute-by-minute narrative of the Day That Will Live in Infamy. Told from the points of view of dozens of characters, from generals and admirals and politicians and diplomats down to deckhands and private soldiers and innocent civilians at all levels, this panoramic overview of one of the most traumatizing and shocking events in American history puts the reader in a position to understand the big picture of strategy and tactics, as well as the intimate details of what the chaos, violence, and presence of death felt like to people immersed in the surprise of an armed attack on American soil.

December 7, 1941, was a turning point in the history of the United States, which had been teetering on a decision between isolationism and intervention. One might argue that every US military engagement since then has been affected by what happened when America learned that it could not stand by and watch war among strangers without potentially becoming involved—whether we wished to or not.

[Little.Egret]

Endeavour, free

The Macmillan Years, 1957-1963: The Emerging Truth by Richard Lamb

First published in 1995 by John Murray (Publishers) Ltd.

After thirty years since his time, Cabinet papers and other private papers are in the public eye...

Armed with the new disclosed information and hindsight prospective, Richard Lamb takes an in-depth look and asks the question: were the Macmillan years successful overall – or did they do more harm than good for future generations?

Taking on different aspects of Macmillan’s premiership, Lamb carefully puzzles together an accurate and unbiased biography of Macmillan’s political career. From the fraught negotiations of entering the UK to EEC and de Gaulle’s bombshell veto, the special relationship between the US and the UK (covering both Eisenhower and JFK’s presidency), the question of nuclear armaments, the crisis between West and East Berlin, the actions of Khrushchev and the Soviet Union, the problem of the commonwealth and, later, independence for Britain’s former African colonies, to Macmillan’s internal handlings of the Conservative party, the Profumo Scandal and it’s unfortunate consequences.

Richard Lamb is the author of two recent books, The Ghosts of Peace 1935-1945 and The Failure of the Eden Government.


https://www.amazon.com/Macmillan-Yea...dp/B077Q9FFTH/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Macmillan-Y.../dp/B077Q9FFTH

https://www.amazon.ca/Macmillan-Year.../dp/B077Q9FFTH

[ReadingManiac]

Under Humor: The Cat Rule Book .99 this weekend.

https://www.amazon.com/Cat-Rule-Book.../dp/B00EKDM3YO

"What do Simon's Cat, Garfield, Dewey the Library Cat and your cat all have in common? They are all part of a secret brotherhood of cats who follow certain rules for dealing with humans!"

[ATDrake]

Bargain @ $1.99-$2.99 each from mostly Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins imprints in the US and sometimes Canada (prices should be the same at the other usual stores):

• Connections & Twin Tracks: The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World by British science historian James Burke (Wikipedia), the former a tie-in to his vastly popular classic TV documentary series (Wikipedia) which IMHO, is one of the best explaining how various discoveries and inventions spark other discoveries and inventions in turn. This edition contains a new preface. The latter expands on his usual sorts of ideas with the notion of showing how two branching paths from a single point end up converging after all. US-only discount, but worth traveling for, IMHO. Highly recommended.
  
  ETA: a little pricier @ $3.99 USD is his most recent book, which is more social history-oriented: American Connections: The Founding Fathers. Networked. showcasing more human figure connections than scientific ones.
• Speaking of Journalism: 12 Writers and Editors Talk About Their Work (US-only) & Extraordinary Lives: The Art and Craft of American Biography (couponable/VIP discount-eligible; available in Canada) edited and presented by the late William Zinsser (Wikipedia), who was a newspaper columnist and writing teacher at Yale University, and also wrote a number of well-regarded classic how-to writing guides.
  
  SoJ consists of essay-lectures at a course Zinsser presented with several of his former students who went on to success in their fields, EL has prominent biographers showcasing how they work to reconstruct their subjects lives, etc.
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain: The 4th, Definitive Edition (available in Canada) & Drawing on the Artist Within ($2.99, US-only) by art teacher Betty Edwards (Wikipedia), her much-reprinted classic DIY artistic self-improvement manual and tie-in sequel. NB: Apparently there's a also Deluxe version of DoTRSotB available, which contains embedded video of Edwards herself demonstrating the techniques, but it costs significantly more at the moment.
  
  I have both of these in paper (technically only a 3rd edition, so I sprang for the ebook-ized 4th). While I can't claim that I'm any good as an artist since I didn't try it for very long, I did manage to get pretty decent at copying Usagi Yojimbo cartoon rabbit heads by following her suggested technique of turning images upside down to make them appear more abstract and replicate the lines as they actually were, rather than trying to draw them rightside up, which tended to distort the proportions in the mind's eye when putting pencil to paper. Anyway, they're full of useful practical advice and I'd certainly recommend giving them a try at these discount prices.