FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by salty-horse

I've always wanted to read it but that thing about the PDF scared me.
However, the Amazon preview appears to be HTML, so I don't know if it means anything.

There are also some negative reviews saying this book is way overhyped and too general to be applicable to whatever field they're working on, so YMMV.

General is good for me. I have an amateur's interest in design.

[sufue]

Peril is now £0.99 at Kindle UK.

Kindle UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B098PH5PTB
Kindle UK/Smile: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B098PH5PTB

Originally Posted by sufue

Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, is on sale for $4.99 today as part of the US Kindle Daily Deal, matched at Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B098PDDZW3
Kindle US/Smile: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B098PDDZW3
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/peril-23

[issybird]

Waiting for Snow in Havana , Carlos M.N. Eire’s wonderful memoir of his life as a boy in Cuba at the end of the Batista regime and the beginning of Castro’s, is $1.99 at Kindle and presumably elsewhere.

https://smile.amazon.com/Waiting-Sno...dp/B000FC0WFQ/

This made my Ten Best list the year I read it.

[sufue]

Collapse is now $1.99 in the US. The links are still good. Excellent book...with lots to wonder about for today's world and various countries...

Originally Posted by sufue

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond has dropped to $2.99 at Kindle and Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004H0M8EA
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/col...evised-edition


As alluded to below, I loved reading Collapse, as well as Diamond's perhaps better known (and Pulitizer prize winning) Guns, Germs and Steel, and a couple of other titles of his that I have read. So I highly recommend grabbing this at $2.99 while you can...

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by sufue

Collapse is now $1.99 in the US. The links are still good. Excellent book...with lots to wonder about for today's world and various countries...

Thanks, sufue!

[Paperbackstash]

Solitary is the unforgettable life story of a man who served more than four decades in solitary confinement—in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, twenty-three hours a day, in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison—all for a crime he did not commit. That Albert Woodfox survived at all was a feat of extraordinary endurance. That he emerged whole from his odyssey within America’s prison and judicial systems is a triumph of the human spirit.

On Sale Currently 3.99
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...SIN=B07MWJ1NPM

[Paperbackstash]

If you are into Royalty books, a lot are on sale currently from HarperCollins especially

The Way We Were: Remembering Diana
By Paul Burrell - 1.99 sale
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003V1WT36...ercollinsus-20

Kate: The Making of a Princess by Claudia Joseph - 2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GUSI04...ercollinsus-20

The Women of Windsor by Catherine Whitney - 1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEGDH2...ercollinsus-20

American Princess by Leslie Carroll - 2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07869GX5Y...ercollinsus-20

The Battle of the Brothers by Robert Lacey, William and Harry--the Inside Story of a Family in Tumult - 1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09CQ2NPYB...ercollinsus-20

The Duchess: Camilla Parker Bowles and the Love Affair That Rocked the Crown by Penny Junor 2.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0713VYF5J...ercollinsus-20

The Queen: A Life in Brief by Robert Lacey - 1.99
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B006O422TI...ercollinsus-20

[Critteranne]

A History of the Jews boxed set by Max I. Dimont is $1.99 today. It includes The Indestructible Jews, The Jews in America, and Appointment in Jerusalem.

"They Have Killed Papa Dead!": The Road to Ford's Theatre, Abraham Lincoln's Murder, and the Rage for Vengeance by Anthony Pitch is $1.99 -- it looks like this one doesn't go on sale often.

[bookmarked]

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler is on sale for $2.99.

National Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist
National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
A PBS “Now Read This” Book Club Selection
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Economist and the Boston Globe

A landmark exposé and “deeply engaging legal history” of one of the most successful, yet least known, civil rights movements in American history (Washington Post).

In a revelatory work praised as “excellent and timely” (New York Times Book Review, front page), Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight, once again makes sense of our fraught constitutional history in this incisive portrait of how American businesses seized political power, won “equal rights,” and transformed the Constitution to serve big business.

Uncovering the deep roots of Citizens United, he repositions that controversial 2010 Supreme Court decision as the capstone of a centuries-old battle for corporate personhood. “Tackling a topic that ought to be at the heart of political debate” (Economist), Winkler surveys more than four hundred years of diverse cases—and the contributions of such legendary legal figures as Daniel Webster, Roger Taney, Lewis Powell, and even Thurgood Marshall—to reveal that “the history of corporate rights is replete with ironies” (Wall Street Journal). We the Corporations is an uncompromising work of history to be read for years to come.

[salty-horse]

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney is $2 on Amazon.com

This hugely influential work of political theory and political history, now powerfully introduced by Angela Davis, “remains as relevant as when it was first published—a call to arms in the class struggle for racial equity” (Los Angeles Review of Books).

A powerful analysis of European colonialism in Africa that stands alongside pan-Africanist classics like C.L.R. James’ Black Jacobins, Eric Williams’ Capitalism & Slavery, and W.E.B. Dubois’ Black Reconstruction.

In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. His deportation catalyzed 20th century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated.

In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the west and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.

[salty-horse]

Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway is $3 on Amazon.com

The U.S. scientific community has long led the world in research on such areas as public health, environmental science, and issues affecting quality of life. Our scientists have produced landmark studies on the dangers of DDT, tobacco smoke, acid rain, and global warming. But at the same time, a small yet potent subset of this community leads the world in vehement denial of these dangers.

Merchants of Doubt tells the story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades. Remarkably, the same individuals surface repeatedly-some of the same figures who have claimed that the science of global warming is "not settled" denied the truth of studies linking smoking to lung cancer, coal smoke to acid rain, and CFCs to the ozone hole. "Doubt is our product," wrote one tobacco executive. These "experts" supplied it.

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, historians of science, roll back the rug on this dark corner of the American scientific community, showing how ideology and corporate interests, aided by a too-compliant media, have skewed public understanding of some of the most pressing issues of our era.

[salty-horse]

Math Games with Bad Drawings: 75 1/4 Simple, Challenging, Go-Anywhere Games—And Why They Matter by Ben Orlin is $3 on Amazon.com
Here's a preview of the section about Quantum Go Fish: PDF

From beloved math popularizer Ben Orlin comes a masterfully compiled*collection of dozens of playable mathematical games.This ultimate game chest*draws on mathematical curios, childhood classics, and soon-to-be classics, each hand-chosen to be (1) fun, (2) thought-provoking, and (3) easy to play. With just paper, pens, and the occasional handful of coins, you and a partner can enjoy hours of fun—and hours of challenge.

Orlin’s sly humor, expansive knowledge, and so-bad-they’re-good drawings show us how simple rules*summon our best thinking.

[Loosheesh]

Agatha Christie: An Elusive Woman - $1.99 at Amazon US

A new, fascinating account of the life of Agatha Christie from celebrated literary and cultural historian Lucy Worsley.

"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was."

Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness.

So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure?

She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn’t do. Lucy Worsley’s biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman.

With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley’s biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

[tomsem]

The Archaeology of Europe’s Drowned Landscapes

Free at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B086ZHRZMC/, Apple Books, and probably everywhere else.

[Aleron Ives]

Yuval Harari's Sapiens is $3 right now.

Kobo
Amazon

From a renowned historian comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and evolution—a #1 international bestseller—that explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be “human.”

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six different species of humans inhabited Earth. Yet today there is only one—homo sapiens. What happened to the others? And what may happen to us?

Most books about the history of humanity pursue either a historical or a biological approach, but Dr. Yuval Noah Harari breaks the mold with this highly original book that begins about 70,000 years ago with the appearance of modern cognition. From examining the role evolving humans have played in the global ecosystem to charting the rise of empires, Sapiens integrates history and science to reconsider accepted narratives, connect past developments with contemporary concerns, and examine specific events within the context of larger ideas.

Dr. Harari also compels us to look ahead, because over the last few decades humans have begun to bend laws of natural selection that have governed life for the past four billion years. We are acquiring the ability to design not only the world around us, but also ourselves. Where is this leading us, and what do we want to become?

Featuring 27 photographs, 6 maps, and 25 illustrations/diagrams, this provocative and insightful work is sure to spark debate and is essential reading for aficionados of Jared Diamond, James Gleick, Matt Ridley, Robert Wright, and Sharon Moalem.