FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[Little.Egret]

Free


The Miraculous Lives of a Man Called Jack by John Cox

October 31, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Beersheba, famous for the mounted charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade and a significant battle in the British campaign for Gaza. It was for his brave action in this battle that my father, Jack, was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal.

At 14 years of age, Jack was a cabin boy on a fishing boat as it rounded Cape Horn. Six years later he was with the British Yeomanry, fighting in the South African Boer War of 1899–1902.

Because his brother had been killed while fighting next to him, he would not go home and stayed in South Africa working in the gold mines of Johannesburg and the diamond mines of the Kimberly. From 1906–08 he was one of the volunteers fighting in the Second Zulu Rebellion. After discharge, he became a Patrol Officer in what is now the Kruger National Park. He did 6 six-month patrols with only his native carriers as company, seldom seeing another white person.

Jack was in Australia when WWI started and he went down to the recruiting office at 4 a.m. hoping to be No. 1 only to find 84 other keen men had arrived there before him. As No. 85 he spent 4 years in the 4th Australian Light Horse Regiment and was in most of their campaigns at Gallipoli, Romani and Palestine. During the Charge at Beersheba, he was awarded the DCM for his very brave action in charging a Turkish machine-gun and its 11-man crew.

He was wounded four times and, excluding the times when he and his fellow Light Horsemen charged into those Turkish artillery bombardments - that murderous fire from Turkish machine guns and their accurate rifle fire - and managed to come out unscathed, he did escape certain death on nine separate occasions during his amazing, adventurous life.

This is the story of my father.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06Y68V7LF

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06Y68V7LF

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B06Y68V7LF

[Little.Egret]

Free

General Courtney Hodges; A Study in Invisibility; : Hodges, Patton, and the Perception of Greatness by Stephen Wishnevsky

Courtney Hicks Hodges deserves recognition as one of the great American military leaders.
He was unique in United States military history as being the only man to rise from the rank of private to the rank of full general.
His career spanned forty-four years and took Hodges around the world.

Hodges served in the Philippines, participated in Pershing’s punitive expedition to Mexico, and fought in both World Wars. In spite of his distinguished career, he has been largely forgotten.

Review "If you are a George Patton hater you will love this book. Those of us that admire Patton know that Patton was Patton and we accept him as he was warts and all as a human being. This author constantly builds up Hodges to saintly levels and then constantly comes back with a sarcastic character assassination of Patton leaving out the whole story on incidences concerning Patton."


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XDPD8HS

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06XDPD8HS

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B06XDPD8HS

[keithdt]

These 2 caught my fancy from November monthly Kindle deals:

Du Pont Dynasty: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Forbidden Bookshelf); 623 pgs., originally published 1984 - $1.99

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

"Award-winning journalist Gerard Colby takes readers behind the scenes of one of America’s most powerful and enduring corporations; now with a new introduction by the author

Their name is everywhere. America’s wealthiest industrial family by far and a vast financial power, the Du Ponts, from their mansions in northern Delaware’s “Chateau Country,” have long been leaders in the relentless drive to turn the United States into a plutocracy.

The Du Pont story in this country began in 1800. Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, official keeper of the gunpowder of corrupt King Louis XVI, fled from revolutionary France to America. Two years later he founded the gunpowder company that called itself “America’s armorer”—and that President Wilson’s secretary of war called a “species of outlaws” for war profiteering. Du Pont Dynasty introduces many colorful characters, including “General” Henry du Pont, who profited from the Civil War to build the Gunpowder Trust, one of the first corporate monopolies; Alfred I. du Pont, betrayed by his cousins and pushed out of the organization, landing in social exile as the powerful “Count of Florida”; the three brothers who expanded Du Pont’s control to General Motors, fought autoworkers’ right to unionize, and then launched a family tradition of waging campaigns to destroy FDR’s New Deal regulatory reforms; Governor Pete du Pont, who ran for president and backed Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Republican Revolution; and Irving S. Shapiro, the architect of Du Pont’s ongoing campaign to undermine effective environmental regulation.

From plans to force President Roosevelt from office, to munitions sales to warlords and the rising Nazis, to Freon’s damage to the planet’s life-protecting ozone layer, to the manufacture of deadly gases and the covered-up poisoning of Du Pont workers, to the reputation the company earned for being the worst polluter of America’s air and water, the Du Pont reign has been dappled with scandal for centuries.

Culled from years of painstaking research and interviews, this fully documented book unfolds like a novel. Laying bare the bitter feuds, power plays, smokescreens, and careless unaccountability that erupted in murder, Colby pulls back the curtain on a dynasty whose formidable influence continues to this day.

Suppressed in myriad ways and the subject of the author’s landmark federal lawsuit, Du Pont Dynasty is an essential history of the United States."


The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York's Diamond District; 252 pgs., originally published 1987 - $.99

https://www.amazon.com/CBS-Murders-V...=UTF8&qid=&sr=

"From Publishers Weekly
On Easter Monday of 1982, Margaret Barbera, an accountant, was shot to death in a parking lot on a Manhattan pier; three technicians from the nearby CBS-TV studios who went to her rescue also were killed. Hammer here recreates the crime and the police work that led to the killer, Donald Nash, a handyman hired by a jewelry manufacturer named Irwin Margolies. Margolies, only a marginally successful entrepreneur, had hatched a plot with the aid of a lawyer to defraud a factoring firm owned by a New York bank. The scheme, which netted millions thanks in part to creative bookkeeping by Barbera, began to unravel, and Margolies determined that the safest course was to eliminate her. Nash, the gunman, is now serving a 100-year sentence, Margolies 50 years. Hammer (The Vatican Connection, Hoodlum Empire) has done an outstanding job of detailing the case thoroughly yet succinctly."

[keithdt]

If anyone's interested here's a link to all of November's non-fiction Kindle deals (334 total, sorted low to high):

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_n...nid=3441883011

[MickeyC]

Originally Posted by keithdt

If anyone's interested here's a link to all of November's non-fiction Kindle deals (334 total, sorted low to high):

https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=sr_nr_n...nid=3441883011

I checked and every one is marked “Not available for purchase from your device”. My device is an iPad. Does this mean you can only purchase it on a Kindle?

[keithdt]

Originally Posted by MickeyC

I checked and every one is marked “Not available for purchase from your device”. My device is an iPad. Does this mean you can only purchase it on a Kindle?

No, you can also purchase from Android devices or PC. You can't purchase from any Apple devices because (as I understand it) Amazon won't agree to the percentage that Apple insists upon.

[keithdt]

Originally Posted by keithdt

No, you can also purchase from Android devices or PC. You can't purchase from any Apple devices because (as I understand it) Amazon won't agree to the percentage that Apple insists upon.

However, as I understand it, once you purchase from another device you would be able to read it on your iPad.

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

Free


The Miraculous Lives of a Man Called Jack by John Cox

October 31, 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Beersheba, famous for the mounted charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade and a significant battle in the British campaign for Gaza. It was for his brave action in this battle that my father, Jack, was awarded a Distinguished Conduct Medal.

At 14 years of age, Jack was a cabin boy on a fishing boat as it rounded Cape Horn. Six years later he was with the British Yeomanry, fighting in the South African Boer War of 1899–1902.

Because his brother had been killed while fighting next to him, he would not go home and stayed in South Africa working in the gold mines of Johannesburg and the diamond mines of the Kimberly. From 1906–08 he was one of the volunteers fighting in the Second Zulu Rebellion. After discharge, he became a Patrol Officer in what is now the Kruger National Park. He did 6 six-month patrols with only his native carriers as company, seldom seeing another white person.

Jack was in Australia when WWI started and he went down to the recruiting office at 4 a.m. hoping to be No. 1 only to find 84 other keen men had arrived there before him. As No. 85 he spent 4 years in the 4th Australian Light Horse Regiment and was in most of their campaigns at Gallipoli, Romani and Palestine. During the Charge at Beersheba, he was awarded the DCM for his very brave action in charging a Turkish machine-gun and its 11-man crew.

He was wounded four times and, excluding the times when he and his fellow Light Horsemen charged into those Turkish artillery bombardments - that murderous fire from Turkish machine guns and their accurate rifle fire - and managed to come out unscathed, he did escape certain death on nine separate occasions during his amazing, adventurous life.

This is the story of my father.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06Y68V7LF

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06Y68V7LF

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B06Y68V7LF

I downloaded it, this sounds like a good read!

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by keithdt

No, you can also purchase from Android devices or PC. You can't purchase from any Apple devices because (as I understand it) Amazon won't agree to the percentage that Apple insists upon.

That's because Apple insists on 30%. Under Agency, the publisher gets 70%. Why would Amazon find 0% for itself agreeable?

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by keithdt

However, as I understand it, once you purchase from another device you would be able to read it on your iPad.

More to the point, you can use that URL in the iPad browser (Safari) and purchase from the browser and request iPad delivery.

[Little.Egret]

Thistle, Free



Randolph: A Study of Churchill's Son by Brian Roberts

‘Born to succeed; doomed to failure’. For all its cruel accuracy, this quip about Randolph Churchill is not quite fair.

He was certainly born to succeed. A member of a great patrician family, good-looking, intelligent, energetic, with great oratorical gifts and quickness of mind, the young Randolph Churchill was the Golden Boy of popular imagination and seen as a young man of destiny.

Grandson of the colourful late-Victorian politician Lord Randolph Churchill and son of the even more celebrated and controversial Winston Churchill, Randolph seemed set fair to continue the family tradition. His father even referred to him as 'the younger Pitt'.

What went wrong?

Brian Roberts, a distinguished historian and biographer, is an acknowledged expert on African history. His previous books include The Zulu Kings, The Diamond Magnates, Churchills in Africa, and Cecil Rhodes and the Princess.{see next post}


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M1ROQ33

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01M1ROQ33

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01M1ROQ33

[Little.Egret]

Thistle, Free


Cecil Rhodes and the Princess by Brian Roberts

Ruthless and visionary, Cecil Rhodes today personifies all the most extreme characteristics of the Victorian Empire-builder. Leaving both a country and a world-famous system of scholarships to commemorate his name, he might have been regarded as proof against personal intrigue. Particularly of the female variety since, in the jargon of the day, he was a confirmed woman-hater. But when he died, many people said his death had been caused by a woman, the notorious Princess Radziwill.

What was the hold this determined Polish adventuress had over him? With a passion for cloak-and-dagger intrigue which had already cost her her place in Russian society, the Princess pursued Rhodes from London to Cape Town. There she forced herself on him so relentlessly that Rhodes was said to get on a horse and gallop away whenever she approached his front door.

Brian Roberts, a distinguished historian and biographer, is an acknowledged expert on African history


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LXKI7JT

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01LXKI7JT

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B01LXKI7JT

[sufue]

Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies by Ross King has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle US. I haven't read this title but have read and loved Brunelleschi's Dome, and also enjoyed Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, both by the same author.

link: https://www.amazon.com/Mad-Enchantme...dp/B01DM9Q5V8/

Spoiler:

From bestselling author Ross King, a brilliant portrait of the legendary artist and the story of his most memorable achievement.

Claude Monet is perhaps the world's most beloved artist, and among all his creations, the paintings of the water lilies in his garden at Giverny are most famous. Monet intended the water lilies to provide "an asylum of peaceful meditation." Yet, as Ross King reveals in his magisterial chronicle of both artist and masterpiece, these beautiful canvases belie the intense frustration Monet experienced in trying to capture the fugitive effects of light, water, and color. They also reflect the terrible personal torments Monet suffered in the last dozen years of his life.

Mad Enchantment tells the full story behind the creation of the Water Lilies, as the horrors of World War I came ever closer to Paris and Giverny and a new generation of younger artists, led by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were challenging the achievements of Impressionism. By early 1914, French newspapers were reporting that Monet, by then seventy-three, had retired his brushes. He had lost his beloved wife, Alice, and his eldest son, Jean. His famously acute vision--what Paul Cezanne called "the most prodigious eye in the history of painting†?--was threatened by cataracts. And yet, despite ill health, self-doubt, and advancing age, Monet began painting again on a more ambitious scale than ever before. Linking great artistic achievement to the personal and historical dramas unfolding around it, Ross King presents the most intimate and revealing portrait of an iconic figure in world culture.

[Little.Egret]

Arcadia Press, Free


Defeat in the West by Milton Shulman

First published in London by Secker & Warburg in April 1947, and New York by Dutton in January 1948

After the phoney war period Shulman signed up for the Canadian army, was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Canadian Armoured Corps and posted to England in June 1943. Stationed in London as a captain he was assigned to the secret operational intelligence unit MI 14b, dealing with the order of battle of the Wehrmacht's formations.
He joined Canadian Army HQ three months before D-Day as a major and by the war's end he was an intelligence officer with the First Canadian Army. While still in uniform, he interviewed many of the captured German generals in the following months and years including Gerd von Rundstedt and Kurt Meyer. As a result of these interviews he wrote this classic Second World War military history.

Milton Shulman (1913 – 2004) was a Canadian author, film and theatre critic.


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075BV7WM5

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B075BV7WM5

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B075BV7WM5

[Little.Egret]

Endeavour, Free

Fighter!: The Story of Air Combat by Robert Jackson

The story of the twentieth century’s most amazing decade, when the science of air fighting leaped from the 150 mph biplane to the 600 mph jet.

Over the battlegrounds of war-torn Spain between 1936 and 1939 young men of half a dozen nations fought for mastery of the sky in a dress rehearsal for the greater conflict that was to come.

Following the evolution of air fighting over the decade embracing those bitter days in Spain and the merciless Pacific air battles of 1945, Robert Jackson traces the course of air combat through Poland and France, when the Luftwaffe was mistress of the sky, to the Battle of Britain, when German fighter pilots at last met their match, and the exploits of the RAF’S Spitfire squadrons as they carried the war to the enemy over occupied Europe.

First published in 1979 by ARTHUR BARKER LIMITED.


Robert Jackson (b. 1941) is a prolific author of military and aviation history, having become a full-time writer in 1969.


https://www.amazon.com/Fighter-Story...dp/B075GX6Z4F/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fighter-Sto...dp/B075GX6Z4F/

https://www.amazon.ca/Fighter-Story-...dp/B075GX6Z4F/