Content FREE (and bargain) books for the Kindle - August 2011

[arcadata]

A Beginner's Guide to Using Your iPhone as a Business Productivity Tool by Dave Caolo

Product Description
The quickest, easiest, and friendliest guide to using your iPhone 4 for business.

After spending hundreds of hours on dozens of computers, the iPhone 4 is the best computer I’ve ever owned. This tiny machine runs Apple’s powerful iOS and features a huge number of fantastic business apps. In this book, I describe the business deployment of the iPhone, how to complete common business tasks such as working with documents, presentations, and the calendar, how to use travel apps...and yes, of course, phone calls.

[arcadata]

Bargain cookbook:

The Gypsy Kitchen by Lisa Lamme is $2.91 at the US Kindle store (Adams Media) - it's still $9.99 at B&N

Product Description:

Feeling uninspired by the contents of your cupboards and fridge? Don’t be! All you need is a little culinary magic to turn what you have into what you crave.
Let gourmet food-store owner Lisa Lamme provide mealtime imagination with delectable recipes from her award-winning Gypsy Kitchen. Spices, oils, and condiments jazz up the boring so you can transform chicken breasts into Grilled Jerk Chicken with Pineapple and Peppers, pork chops into Garlic Roast Pork with Rosemary Apple Sauce, and fish fillets into Marmalade Glazed Salmon. Now, you’ll be able to conjure up what you want, whenever you want it.

Whether you’re whipping up dinner after work or entertaining friends last minute, The Gypsy Kitchen dazzles and delivers dishes that are certain to satisfy.

[koland]

Hidden in Plain View ($0.99), the second in the Darryl Billups Mysteries series by Blair S. Walker, is today's Kindle Deal of the Day. You'll probably want to start with the first, though, and it's on an unannounced sale, at $2.99: Up Jumped the Devil. These are published by AmazonEncore, so I don't expect to see them elsewhere.

Book Description
In the second installment of Blair S. Walker’s Darryl Billups series, the intrepid reporter has left his blue-collar Baltimore roots for a new gig in New York. But life in the big city isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Luckily for Darryl, the Baltimore Herald is only too happy to welcome its star reporter back home, as are Darryl’s girlfriend Yolanda and her young son Jamal. Darryl is promoted to editor, but before long is itching to return to his former crime beat. He gets his chance when the nude bodies of African-American professionals begin turning up around town, their faces ominously marked with Confederate-flag decals. At a loss for suspects, homicide detective Phillip Gardner calls on his old friend Darryl for help unraveling the case. Darryl eagerly reconnects with Baltimore’s seedy underbelly and is soon hot on the trail of a killer who will transform his notions about gender, race, and the workings of the criminal mind. To break this story, Darryl must learn to look at the world in a totally different way—or become the killer’s most high-profile victim yet!

[arcadata]

These books from Bloomsbury are discounted at the US Kindle store:

Chef by Jaspreet Singh ($1.50)

Product Description
Shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book and nominated for the 2010 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Kirpal Singh is travelling on the slow train to Kashmir. As India passes by the window in a stream of tiny lights, glistening fields and huddled, noisy towns, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years... Kirpal, Kip to his friends, is timorous and barely twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar’s camp, nestled in the shadow of the mighty Siachen Glacier that claimed his father’s life. He is placed under the supervision of Chef Kishen, a fiery, anarchic mentor with long earlobes and a caustic tongue, who guides Kip towards the heady spheres of food and women. ‘The smell of a woman is a thousand times better than cooking the most sumptuous dinner, kid,’ he muses, over an evening beer. Kip is embarrassed – he has never slept with a woman, though a loose-limbed nurse in the local hospital has caught his eye. In Srinagar, Kashmir, a contradictory place of erratic violence, extremes of temperature and high-altitude privilege, Kip learns to prepare indulgent Kashmiri dishes such as Mughlai mutton and slow-cooked Nahari, as well as delicacies from Florence, Madrid, Athens and Tokyo. Months pass and, though he is Sikh, Kip feels secure in his allegiance to India, the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani ‘terrorist’ with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river, and changes everything.

Mesmeric, mournful and intensely lyrical, Chef is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love and memory, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir.

Falling Sideways by Thomas E. Kennedy ($1.69)

Product Description
There seems to be no shortage of business at the Tank, a high-profile firm in Copenhagen. There are meetings to attend, memos to write, colleagues to undermine. But when the Tank's nefarious CEO announces a round of downsizing, everyone becomes exponentially more concerned about … whatever it is they're doing.

Not since Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End has there been such a savvy satire of contemporary work culture, and the distorting effects it can have on our lives.

Following these imperiled company men and women out into the autumn days and nights of Copenhagen, Thomas E. Kennedy traces the ripple effects of the news at the Tank as it impacts spouses, children, and lovers. Top executive Frederick Breathwaite is frantically trying to ensure a stable future for his son, while the boy's greatest fear is that his future might resemble his father's absurd present. Harald Jaeger is estranged from his wife and daughters but pursuing desperate passions for other women (including the Tank's married CFO). And while he's lost in amorous fantasies, he has managed to catch the CEO's eye-as a possible replacement for Breathwaite.

Sharp, funny, but remarkably tender, Falling Sideways is the second book in Kennedy's virtuoso Copenhagen Quartet, and a book that will continue to build his reputation as one of America's most versatile literary novelist

Troubadour by Mary Hoffman ($1.96)

Product Description
A story of persecution and poetry, love and war set in 13th century Southern France.

As crusaders sweep through the country, destroying all those who do not follow their religion, Bertrand risks his life to warn others of the invasion. As a troubadour, Bertrand can travel without suspicion from castle to castle, passing word about the coming danger. In the meantime Elinor, a young noblewoman, in love with Bertrand, leaves her comfortable home and family and becomes a troubadour herself. Danger encircles them both, as the rising tide of bloodshed threatens the fabric of the society in which they live.

Pickle Impossible by Eli Stutz ( $2.07)

Product Description
Twelve-year-old Pierre's remarkable family is known far and wide for their delicious pickles. But when the pickle farm is threatened, only Pierre can save it-by safely transporting a jar of world-famous pickles to an international pickle competition. When Pierre is kidnapped, a cunning young girl named Aurore rescues him. Together they set off with just twenty-four hours until the competition begins. To protect their pickles on the journey, Pierre and Aurore must navigate the ghostly catacombs of Paris, figure out how to safely crash-land a plane, enlist the help of a world-class scientist, and escape a villain who will stop at nothing to capture their jar of pickles.

This madcap adventure has everything a young reader could ask for, including an unlikely friendship, dangerous villains, magical coincidences, and a cliff-hanger at the end of every chapter.

Invisible River by Helena McEwen ($2.27)

Product Description
I walked out into the autumn morning and smelt a bonfire behind the exhaust fumes. I only had to cross the road to walk into the tall glass cube that would be my art school for the next three years.

Evie has left her father, her life in Cornwall and her childhood behind her to begin a very different sort of life in London. At first the great city provides her with a world of inspiration. Her imagination is fired by the history, and the scenes of London. With Rob, Bianca and 'the ballerina', Evie discovers the ancient and ever-changing city and her paintings are filled with colour and fantasy as she indulges her need to escape. This new life seems safe and peaceful until the moment her alcoholic father arrives and spins this new world around so that the past is again her present. Evie struggles to carry on with the life she has been building but her fears and memories are never far away. The dreams and the nightmares come together on the canvas of Evie's young life and it is her new friends, the city she has fallen in love with, and most of all, her growing friendship with a talented young sculptor, that must hold her together.

This is the story of a daughter, an artist and the moment when you realise your life is your own. Helena McEwen draws together the themes of art, love, friendship and memory with a painters skill, in a story filled with hope.

Pastworld by Ian Beck ($3.50)

Product Description
What if Victorian London were an amusement park where the inhabitants were actors hired to entertain visitors from the twenty-first century? Now imagine if Jack the Ripper was a planned attraction gone horribly wrong.

Life inside the park, Pastworld, is all Eve has ever known. But then she meets a tourist in terrible trouble. Their adventure through this dark and dangerous theme park is sure to grab teens in paperback.

[arcadata]

The Murder at the Vicarage (Agatha Christie Mysteries Collection) by Agatha Christie

Description:

Agatha Christie's genius for detective fiction is unparalleled. Her worldwide popularity is phenomenal, her characters engaging, her plots spellbinding. No one knows the human heart--or the dark passions that can stop it--better than Agatha Christie. She is truly the one and only Queen of Crime.

Miss Marple--Agatha Christie's immortal spinster sleuth with the razor-sharp mind and an intuitive understanding of criminal behavior--encounters a compelling murder mystery in the sleepy little village of St. Mary Mead, where under the seemingly peaceful exterior of an English country village lurks intrigue, guilt, deception and death.

Colonel Protheroe, local magistrate and overbearing land-owner is the most detested man in the village. Everyone--even in the vicar--wishes he were dead. And very soon he is--shot in the head in the vicar's own study. Faced with a surfeit of suspects, only the inscrutable Miss Marple can unravel the tangled web of clues that will lead to the unmasking of the killer.

[arcadata]

Girls to the Rescue Book #1 - 1 free story by Bruce Lansky

Product Description
In most heroic tales, a helpless young lady waits around for a prince to rescue her. But the spunky girls in this entertaining series are much too busy saving the day to await Prince Charming. These stories from around the world inspire readers to become a new kind of heroine. If you enjoy the stories in this book, look for more fun adventures in the other books in the series.

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

Crony Capitalists in Our Backyards: Who They Are, What They Do and How to Fight Back by Amy Handlin (Broadside e-books) Pre-order (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
New from Voices of the Tea Party. In Crony Capitalism in Our Back Yards, Amy Handlin, a Harvard educated Republican member of New Jersey’s General Assembly, demonstrates that crony capitalism is as much of a problem at the state and local level as it is at the federal level. Drawing on her personal experiences, Ms. Handlin paints a colorful picture of some of the political insiders who’ve used their positions of power to advance their own financial interests at the expense of the public welfare . Ms. Handlin concludes with a set of practical recommendations that average citizens can undertake to fight crony capitalism in their own back yards.

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

Bowden by Mike Freeman (HarperCollins e-books) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
He is a giant among coaches, a Hall of Famer with a legacy that spans six full decades of coaching, and arguably the greatest Division I college football coach in history. And now Bobby Bowden finally has a biography that befits his stature: Bowden by award-winning journalist and author Mike Freeman.

Based on six years of research and interviews with Bowden himself, not to mention the Bowden family, former players, and opposing coaches, Bowden is the complete stunning story of the making of a legend.

Despite growing up in the segregated South and witnessing the ugly racism of the time, Bowden still developed into one of the most race-sensitive coaches in college history. When sick as a child, he listened to the radio and gained a taste for war strategy and for Alabama football games on Saturdays. He played football in high school but decided he wanted to be a coach. After years of turning around smaller football programs, and following a tumultuous but successful head coaching tenure at West Virginia University, Bowden accepted the post at Florida State University (FSU), a failing program that was regularly beaten by in-state rival University of Florida. In fact, just the year before Bowden became coach, in 1975, the president of FSU contemplated terminating the program altogether, particularly because the team had won only four games in the past three years.

What Bowden accomplished at FSU is nothing short of miraculous: twenty-one bowl wins and two national championships. And he was the only coach to secure a top-five ranking in the Associated Press polls for fourteen straight seasons. A brilliant tactician, he helped usher the pro passing game into college football, after initially doubting it could work on the college level. He has been an unrivaled recruiter, not only coaching his players but also becoming a surrogate father to many of them, all while producing thirty-one consensus All-Americans over the course of his tenure. He spawned one of the greatest rivalries in sports against the University of Miami. He trails only Penn State's Joe Paterno in career victories.

Along the way he has had to deal with family tragedies, scandals, and the rise and fall of his three sons' coaching careers. But he has been steadfast, with his good humor intact and with Ann, his wife of sixty years, at his side, raising a family of six children and now twenty-one grandchildren. As he nears the end of his career, though, the critics have their knives out, claiming, among many other things, that he has become a dinosaur who clings to his job so that he can win more games than Paterno.

This work examines the total Bowden and is the first of its kind on a one-of-a-kind coach. Poignant, blunt, and eye-opening, Bowden is a towering biography of a man who has left his mark on FSU and the game of college football.

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management: Lasting Lessons from the Best Leadership Minds of Our Time by Alan Murray (HarperCollins e-books) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
From The Wall Street Journal comes the definitive guide to management ideas and practices with lasting impact.

For decades, understanding management—what works, and what doesn't—has been the pursuit of the world's best and brightest. Globally, there are more than 1,500 credible schools offering master's degrees in business administration, and hundreds of magazines and newspapers and thousands of books devoted to the subject. What's been missing is a simple and convenient way to disseminate the best ideas and practices to managers everywhere, at all levels and in all kinds of industries and organizations.

The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management draws the best from the existing body of knowledge and research, and summarizes it in a simple, clear, and useful way. Focusing on classic and contemporary works that have been recommended by members of The Wall Street Journal CEO Council—all chief executives of large and successful global companies—it is an invaluable reference and essential tool for every manager, new and experienced alike.

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

The Making of a Philosopher by Colin Mcginn (Harper Perennial) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
Part memoir, part study, The Making of a Philosopher is the self–portrait of a deeply intelligent mind as it develops over a life on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Making of a Philosopher follows Colin McGinn from his early years in England reading Descartes and Anselm, to his years in the states, first in Los Angeles, then New York. McGinn presents a contemporary academic take on the great philosophical figures of the twentieth century, including Bertrand Russell, Jean–Paul Sartre, and Noam Chomsky, alongside stories of the teachers who informed his ideas and often became friends and mentors, especially the colorful A.J. Ayer at Oxford.

McGinn's prose is always elegant and probing; students of contemporary philosophy and the general reader alike will absorb every page.

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

Don't Tread on Me: The Story of My Run for California Governor as a Tea Party Candidate by Larry Naritelli (Broadside e-books) Pre-order (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
New from Voices of the Tea Party. Deeply upset at the way the Republican Party abandoned its conservative base in the elections of 2008, Larry Naritelli had taken to yelling at his television, prompting his 13-year-old son to ask if there would be a revolution in the country. Naritelli responded by taking his son to a Tea Party protest, to teach him about the freedoms granted by our Constitution. Naritelli began speaking publicly about the government-imposed drought that was destroying California’s farmers, creating 40% levels of unemployment, and depressing real estate values. In 2010, he ran against Meg Whitman for Governor as the Tea Party candidate, in the California Republican Primary in 2010. Don't Tread on Me is the inside story of the making of a Tea Party gubernatorial candidate.

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

The Rose and the Shield (Avon Romance) by Sara Bennett (HarperCollins e-books) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
Beautiful Lady Rose, the fiercely independent mistress of Somerford, reluctantly agrees to hire a bold Viking warrior, Gunnar Olafson, and his mercenaries to protect her undefended lands. But although Gunnar takes her breath away with his steel-hard muscles and eyes afire with undisguised yearning she dares not trust him. But Gunnar is not what he seems. Posing as a hired soldier, he is duty-bound to expose Rose, whom his liege lord believes is plotting against him. Somerford is to be loyal Gunnar's reward, but he quickly realizes Rose is the true prize. He never expected to be bewitched by the exquisite beauty he is sworn to betray, and now he is discovering that her love is what he truly desires a need he must satisfy, even if dishonor is its price ...

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

The Style Strategy by Nina Garcia (HarperCollins e-books) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
"This book is written to help propel you forward, into that place where style and shopping are one. Neither can thrive without the other pulling its proper weight. Effortlessly balancing the two is your mission."

From much-loved fashion maven and New York Times bestselling author Nina Garcia comes her most indispensable style primer yet—this one focused on looking timelessly chic, all while saving money!

Armed with Nina's no-fail The Style Strategy, fashionistas will not only discover a myriad of shopping alternatives sure to help them attain high-end looks at lower prices, but also learn how to maximize what they already have through maintenance, ingenuity, and creative style choices. Step by step, Nina helps readers honestly answer three key questions—What do I have? What do I need? What do I want?—before making purchases, so they can effectively eliminate any unnecessary spending.

This book also celebrates some of the most extraordinary women of the past, who remained admiringly fashion-forward during their own era's economic hardships.

Part of the growing classic collection from Nina Garcia, which already includes The Little Black Book of Style and The One Hundred, The Style Strategy is a must-have for this season and all seasons!

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

Betrayal by Andrew Kirtzman (HarperCollins e-books) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
It was an inconceivable deception: over $65 billion stolen in the world's largest Ponzi scheme.

Including new and revealing interviews with those who worked closest to himand his family, Betrayal is an in-depth, penetrating look at the man who perpetrated history's most notorious financial crime.

To the people who knew him, Bernie Madoff was a kind and honorable person; a loving father and husband; generous to his employees and charitable even to strangers. On Wall Street, he was known as a wise elder statesman, wildly successful in his investments but never too risky with people's money. He was so revered and trusted that thousands placed their life savings with him, and he in turn provided them with early retirements and affluent lifestyles.

But on December 11, 2008, Madoff confessed that he'd lied to them all. The monthly financial statements he'd sent customers for decades were all works of fiction. Their money was gone.

Despite the crush of media attention on Madoff's scam, little is known about Madoff himself. What could lead a seemingly good man to ruin the lives of everyone who ever cared about him? What caused Bernie Madoff to commit an unspeakable act of betrayal, bankrupting his family, his friends, his mentors, and thousands of investors who depended upon him for their livelihoods?

Betrayal: The Life and Lies of Bernie Madoff is about the man who realized that he could have everything he wanted if he simply lied to the people who trusted him the most. Author Andrew Kirtzman tracked down more than a hundred people from Madoff's past, from the first girl he ever kissed to family members who played in his house as children; from his secretaries to his drivers; from traders at his company to his inner circle of friends. He pored through thousands of pages of court records; private e-mails; phone-conversation transcripts; and census, military, and immigration records. The result is a fascinating story about the rise of a deeply immoral man.

Kirtzman describes Madoff's feelings of inferiority and humiliation as a child, and his obsession with making money to prove himself worthy as he grew older. He reveals Madoff's construction of a criminal enterprise at a young age, long before he's ever claimed it began. He paints a picture of a loving yet strange family that ran a multibillion-dollar corporation like a small family restaurant. He offers an inside look at life within the company and the characters who worked on the infamous seventeenth floor. He reveals the details of an underground flow of cash that no one has known about until now. And he chronicles the desperate moments leading up to Madoff's fall, from the perspective of the people who spent the last hours with him before his house of cards collapsed.

[arcadata]

FYI, currently just free for those in the UK

Dust by Arthur Slade (Dava Enterprises) (Amazon Main, Amazon UK)

Product Description
*Winner of the Governor General’s Award
*Winner of the Mr. Christie's Award
*An American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults
*Nominated for an Edgar Award (Mystery Writers of America)

For fans of Stephen King and Ray Bradbury...

Imagine a depression-era town where it hasn’t rained for years. A pale rainmaker with other-worldly eyes brings rain to the countryside and mesmerizes the townspeople, but the children begin to disappear one by one. Only young Robert Steelgate is able to resist the rainmaker’s spell and begin the struggle to discover what has happened to his missing brother and the other children.

"Read the riveting first chapter of Dust and you're already past the point of no return. Arthur Slade writes with the art and grace of a hypnotist, and you won't be able to put this book down. It's sensational!" Kenneth Oppel, New York Times bestselling author of AIRBORN and SKYBREAKER.