FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[Courant]

Zen and the Samurai Sword by Anthony Cummins for $1.99 on Amazon

This unique book combines Japanese warrior techniques with ancient Zen practices for mental clarity and physical agility, giving readers a Samurai edge that will carry them through life.

Embark on a warrior’s quest to achieve the Zen-like state of a samurai

Sharpen your mind, hone your senses, gain physical agility and reach peace through 100 key lessons in this unique book, as leading expert on Japanese military arts Antony Cummins brings ancient wisdom into the modern world.

Combining esteemed philosophy, practical sword skills and traditional calligraphic practices – with a dash of the science behind Zen – this book will arm you with the spiritual weapons to engage in the fight to come: the conflict within your own mind.

Antony Cummins is the founder of the Historical Ninjutsu Research Team, which has previously published The Book of Ninja and The Book of Samurai (Watkins). Antony also works as a consultant and co-presenter on high-end documentaries on Japan that are distributed by National Geographic, and is the Official Tourism Ambassador for Wakayama. He has been recognised by peers as a leading expert in the discovery of military arts of medieval Japan. His most recent book was How to be a Modern Samurai (Watkins).

[Cactus Chef]

Man and His Symbols by Carl G. Jung is $2 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

The landmark text about the inner workings of the unconscious mind—from the symbolism that unlocks the meaning of our dreams to their effect on our waking lives and artistic impulses—featuring more than a hundred updated images that break down Carl G. Jung’s revolutionary ideas

“What emerges with great clarity from the book is that Jung has done immense service both to psychology as a science and to our general understanding of man in society.”—The Guardian

“Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is limitless.”

Since our inception, humanity has looked to dreams for guidance. But what are they? How can we understand them? And how can we use them to shape our lives?

There is perhaps no one more equipped to answer these questions than the legendary psychologist Carl G. Jung. It is in his life’s work that the unconscious mind comes to be understood as an expansive, rich world just as vital and true a part of the mind as the conscious, and it is in our dreams—those personal, integral expressions of our deepest selves—that it communicates itself to us.

A seminal text written explicitly for the general reader, Man and His Symbols is a guide to understanding our dreams and interrogating the many facets of identity—our egos and our shadows, “the dark side of our natures.” Full of fascinating case studies and examples pulled from philosophy, history, myth, fairy tales, and more, this groundbreaking work—profusely illustrated with hundreds of visual examples—offers invaluable insight into the symbols we dream that demand understanding, why we seek meaning at all, and how these very symbols affect our lives. Armed with the knowledge of the self and our shadow, we may build fuller, more receptive lives.

By illuminating the means to examine our prejudices, interpret psychological meanings, break free of our influences, and recenter our individuality, Man and His Symbols proves to be—decades after its conception—a revelatory, absorbing, and relevant experience.

[Cyclops]

Any natural history titles?

[Loosheesh]

Napoleon: A Life by Andrew Roberts is $1.99 at Amazon US.

The definitive biography of the great soldier-statesman by the acclaimed author of Churchill and The Last King of America—winner of the LA Times Book prize, finalist for the Plutarch prize, winner of the Fondation Napoleon prize and a New York Times bestseller

“A thrilling tale of military and political genius… Roberts is an uncommonly gifted writer.” —The Washington Post

Austerlitz, Borodino, Waterloo: his battles are among the greatest in history, but Napoleon Bonaparte was far more than a military genius and astute leader of men. Like George Washington and his own hero Julius Caesar, he was one of the greatest soldier-statesmen of all times.

Andrew Roberts’s Napoleon is the first one-volume biography to take advantage of the recent publication of Napoleon’s thirty-three thousand letters, which radically transform our understanding of his character and motivation. At last we see him as he was: protean multitasker, decisive, surprisingly willing to forgive his enemies and his errant wife Josephine. Like Churchill, he understood the strategic importance of telling his own story, and his memoirs, dictated from exile on St. Helena, became the single bestselling book of the nineteenth century.

An award-winning historian, Roberts traveled to fifty-three of Napoleon’s sixty battle sites, discovered crucial new documents in archives, and even made the long trip by boat to St. Helena. He is as acute in his understanding of politics as he is of military history. Here at last is a biography worthy of its subject: magisterial, insightful, beautifully written, by one of our foremost historians.

[salty-horse]

Maintenance: Of Everything - Part One is $2 on Amazon.com (only)

The first in-depth exploration of maintenance—and a powerful argument for its civilizational importance—from the author of How Buildings Learn and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer—until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional.

The first in a multi-volume work, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One offers a comprehensive overview of the civilizational importance of maintenance. The book begins with a dramatic contest of maintenance styles under life-critical conditions: the Golden Globe around-the-world solo sailboat race of 1968. It goes on to explore the insights that can be gleaned from vehicle maintenance, from the zeal of motorcycle maintainers to the maintenance philosophies that fought for dominance of the auto industry to the state of electric vehicle manufacturing today, with absorbing detours into the evolution of precision in manufacturing, the enduring importance of manuals, sustainment in the military, and the never-ending battle against corrosion.

Maintenance: Of Everything is a wide-ranging and provocative call to expand what we mean by “maintenance”—not just the tiresome preventative tasks but the whole grand process of keeping a thing going. It invites us to understand not only the profound impact maintenance has on our daily lives but also why taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our very planet—can be a radical act.

[salty-horse]

Israel: What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov is £2 in the UK (Kobo, Amazon)

A leading genocide scholar explores the history of Zionism, Israel’s lurch towards extreme oppression and violence, and why it stands accused of crimes against humanity

Professor Omer Bartov was born on a kibbutz, grew up in Tel Aviv and served in the Israel Defence Forces during the Yom Kippur War. He went on to become an expert on the German army and the Holocaust, before turning his attention to his native country.

In Israel: What Went Wrong?, Bartov explores the transformation of Zionism from a movement of Jewish emancipation and liberation into a state ideology of ethno-nationalism, exclusion and violent domination of Palestinians. He traces the process whereby Israel – whose establishment in 1948 received international support in the aftermath of the Holocaust – now faces accusations of war crimes and genocide.

What are the implications of Israel’s near total impunity for the post-1945 regime of international law? And how do we understand the widespread support for these policies by Israel’s Jewish citizens?

The result is a searing and urgent critique that addresses today’s debates over Zionism, genocide, and the future of Israel with rigour and depth.

[salty-horse]

Ungrounding by Eyal Weizman is £2 in the UK (Amazon only ATM, but price-matchable on Kobo)

A devastating, meticulous account of the history of Israel’s destruction of Gaza from an acclaimed architect and investigator

'Urgent and essential' DAVID WENGROW
'Extraordinary' ILAN PAPPÉ

Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel.

In Ungrounding, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable.

Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised – and how Israel’s actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.

Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams*, Ungrounding* is an essential document of atrocity in our time.

[salty-horse]

Completing the trilogy of new books by jews with a non/anti-Zionist slant:
Here Where We Live Is Our Country by Molly Crabapple is $3 in the US (Kobo, Amazon)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The dramatic story of the Jewish Bund—a revolutionary movement from a vanished world—and its radical vision of solidarity in an age of division.

“Molly Crabapple beckons readers through a portal to an irresistible, lost world, one bound together by passion, solidarity, and a burning hunger for justice.”—Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of No Logo and Doppelganger

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Sam Rothbort created “memory paintings” with the hope of resurrecting the vanished world of his shtetl childhood. Decades later, his great-granddaughter, the award-winning artist Molly Crabapple, discovered these paintings and one stood out: a girl, her dress the color of sky, hurling a rock through a cottage window. Itka the Bundist, Breaking Windows.

Itka is how Crabapple met the Jewish Labor Bund. Once the most influential Jewish political force in eastern Europe, the Bund was secular, socialist, and uncompromisingly anti-Zionist. The Bundists fought for dignity and equality, not in an imagined homeland in Palestine but “here where we live.”

In the first popular history of the Bund, Crabapple re-creates their extraordinary world through dramatic portraits of insurgent poets and antireligious rebels, clandestine revolutionaries and lovers on the barricades. The Bundists live deeply within this violent, volatile, and somehow hopeful period, as their stories interweave with the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust. The Bund’s rise and fall raises the vital question: What can we learn from a movement that, for all its toughness, imagination, and moral clarity, was largely destroyed?

Here Where We Live Is Our Country reanimates a band of idealists who broadened our global political imagination. As we once again contend with nationalism, repression, and the struggle for belonging, the Bund’s remarkable story and message—that liberation, dignity, and solidarity must begin where we stand—reaches across time as a guide to our own urgent moment.