FREE/BARGAIN - Non-Fiction - 2015

[GtrsRGr8]

Suzy Cohen, RPh has a syndicated column that runs in newspapers called "Dear Pharmacist." It runs in our local newspaper here.

Cohen is a Registered Pharmacist and deals with the usual synthetic drugs that you get in the usual pharmacies. However, she specializes in "educating people about the benefits of natural vitamins, herbs and minerals." That's what her newspaper column is about. I've found Cohen's information invaluable and it's stuff that you just don't hear anywhere else.

Cohen is offering a free pdf book called Spices that Heal. It's free for signing up for her newsletter.

I just signed up myself and got an email message with a direct link to the book very soon thereafter. It is 34 pages long, full-color, and easy to read. Down at the bottom of the email message there is a link "Rapid removal with SafeUnsubscribe," so if you're so inclined it looks like you just can get the freebie and unsubscribe to her newsletter very easily.

To get the book, go to her website. You easily will see the link to the newsletter signup and ebook offer.

[icedtea]

If you are a fan of Canadian musician David Usher, or are interested in his take on the creative process:

Let the Elephants Run at Kobo Canada, currently $4.99 CAD (also, a surprise to me, couponable; published by House of Anansi Press.)
At Amazon.ca (Before they price matched, it was about $15 CAD.)

The activity sheets are available for PDF download; link is in the book.

At David Usher’s company, CloudID Creativity Labs, there is a sign on the wall that reads: “Dream big, let the elephants run!” The words are a reminder for us to hold a place in our minds for creativity, where big ideas can form and our imagination can run free. Based on his wildly popular speaking engagements, Let the Elephants Run shows us how to reignite creativity whether in the head office, the home office or the artist’s studio.

Usher believes creativity is in our DNA; it's in everyone, not just the creative class. We all start our lives as creative beings but for many that spark becomes lost over time. How do we jump-start our creative process as adults? What does it means to be a creative person? How do we follow through with our ideas and turn them into tangible outcomes?

Usher empowers readers to achieve more “aha” moments through two cornerstone principles of creativity: freedom and structure. Using a mix of personal anecdotes and professional examples from the worlds of industry, technology, science, music and art, he shows us that creativity is not magic; it is a learnable skill that any person or business can master. The dynamic full-colour design includes photographs, artwork and illustrations, as well as action pages to help readers start cultivating the habit of documenting their ideas for future execution.

Let the Elephants Run is an essential guidebook to reconnecting with our imaginations and nurturing our creativity in accessible and productive ways.

[Fbone]

The Start of World War II by Charles River Editors. FREE.

[bfisher]

On sale today at Amazon Canada for $CDN 1.99
Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne C. Heller

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00QHIY406

Ze blurb:

Hannah Arendt, one of the most gifted and provocative voices of her era, was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and berated by her critics as a poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that arose after the publication of her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of the kidnapped Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.

Arendt was a woman of many contradictions. She was brilliant, beautiful when young, and irresistible to gifted men, even in her chain-smoking, intellectually provocative middle age. She learned to write in English only at the age of thirty-six, and yet her first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations of Americans and Europeans viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous—and most divisive—work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, created fierce controversy that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the great romantic philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger.

In this fast-paced, comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s apparent contradictions and her greatest achievements to her sense of being what she called a “conscious pariah”—one of those few people in every time and place who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to gain the acceptance of others.

[kennyc]

December free ebook from University of Chicago press:

Dangerous Work: Diary of an Arctic Adventure
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by bfisher

On sale today at Amazon Canada for $CDN 1.99
Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne C. Heller

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/B00QHIY406

Ze blurb:
. . . .

Thanks for your post.

For Mobilereaders in the U.S., ze ebook is also available here, for $1.99. Here's the linky.

[GtrsRGr8]

Get a pdf of the book Neuroscience, Science of the Brain: An Introduction for Young Students. It is 60 pages, and free.

The book is available at the University of Montana website, but is produced by the British Neuroscience Association and the European Dana Alliance for the Brain.

The ebook is very colorful, and chock-full of nice illustrations. That is really helpful in keeping the interest of "young students," to whom the book is supposedly directed. The illustrations also help comprehension of concepts and the book also appears to be well-written, pluses for people of all ages.

One negative that I see about the book is the fact that the text uses a particular sans serif font that I find to be annoying. But ymmv. (Whatever happened to the accepted thinking that it is better to use a serif font for extended amounts of text, because it is easier on the eye? It seems that more and more publishers are using sans serif typefaces nowadays. Why? But, I digress.)

You may be wondering why I made this post on the non-fiction thread. Wouldn't have been more appropriate to have posted it on a children's/young people's thread? Well, unless your "young student" is a science prodigy or something, the book probably is going to be much too difficult for him or her. Let me give you an example of a sentence in the book, a sentence admittedly more difficult than most in the book: Neurotransmitters are stored in tiny spherical bags called synaptic vesicles in the endings of axons. There are vesicles for storage and vesicles closer to nerve endings that are ready to be released. The arrival of an action potential leads to the opening of ion-channels that let in calcium (Ca++). This activates enzymes that act on a range of presynaptic proteins . . . . Huh? However, adults may find it just the thing to get a good, basic knowledge of the subject of neuroscience--I downloaded it for myself for just that reason.

Here's the direct link to the University of Montana webpage with the downloadable ebook.

[AnemicOak]

Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America by Jack Rakove has dropped to $2.99 (normally $9.99)
Amazon US | Kobo | Google | B&N

In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted primarily to family, craft, and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become "revolutionary" by ambition, but when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved, in a matter of months, from protest to war.

In this remarkable book, the historian Jack Rakove shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers—how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. Rakove shakes off accepted notions of these men as godlike visionaries, focusing instead on the evolution of their ideas and the crystallizing of their purpose. In Revolutionaries, we see the founders before they were fully formed leaders, as individuals whose lives were radically altered by the explosive events of the mid-1770s. They were ordinary men who became extraordinary—a transformation that finally has the literary treatment it deserves.

Spanning the two crucial decades of the country’s birth, from 1773 to 1792, Revolutionaries uses little-known stories of these famous (and not so famous) men to capture—in a way no single biography ever could—the intensely creative period of the republic’s founding. From the Boston Tea Party to the First Continental Congress, from Trenton to Valley Forge, from the ratification of the Constitution to the disputes that led to our two-party system, Rakove explores the competing views of politics, war, diplomacy, and society that shaped our nation.

Thoughtful, clear-minded, and persuasive, Revolutionaries is a majestic blend of narrative and intellectual history, one of those rare books that makes us think afresh about how the country came to be, and why the idea of America endures.

[ATDrake]

X-link to the DRM-free megathread for the new Humble Bundle:

Humble Book Bundle Learn Raspberry Pi + Arduino presented by Make: contains a lot of books for DIY robotics programmers, from the popular magazine.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by AnemicOak

Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America by Jack Rakove has dropped to $2.99 (normally $9.99)
Amazon US | Kobo | Google | B&N

Good post. Thanks.

Someone might wonder if "new history" means a revisionist history. Some of you may dislike them and try to stay away from them. I am that way. Well, according to at least one Amazon reviewer, it is not a revisionist history. The Publishers Weekly review quoted on the Amazon webpage for the book says, "it's new in being a distinctive, fresh retelling of this epochal tale."

[GtrsRGr8]

Have a budding young poet at home? Are you a teacher of young children? If so, you may really appreciate this freebie. It's the 75-page pdf teaching guide to another book, River of Words: Young Poets and Artists on the Nature of Things.

While this book is intended to accompany another book, frankly I don't see the main book as being necessary (or even all that useful, for that matter). The teaching guide stands alone just fine.

The main book is sold, for example at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/River-Words-Ar...river+of+words). The teaching guide is apparently not sold anywhere, only given away.

Here's an excerpt from the introduction of the teaching guide:
The teaching strategies in this guide will help students get beyond preconceived notions about poetry, inhibitions and fears, excessive reliance on rhyme, and the thorny host of other impediments to creativity and expression that a poetry assignment often invokes. Connie and Harriet have created a fun, investigatory, challenging set of classroom activities that we hope will help you to inspire your students to explore both their “inner” worlds and the complicated, endlessly fascinating “outer” world around them.

The teaching guide comes "highly recommended!" by Homeschool Freebie of the Day. And, I can tell you, from thumbing through the book, that the material is excellent.

Here's a direct link to the pdf.

[issybird]

On sale for $2.99 is Wild Bill Donovan: The Spymaster Who Created the OSS and Modern American Espionage, by Douglas Waller. The title pretty much says it; Donovan was America's top spook in WWII and the OSS was the precursor to the CIA. Available at Kobo and Amazon and presumably other (US at any rate) purveyors, since it's S&S. If you buy the Kindle version, you can add Audible for $3.99.

This was already on my wishlist, so I was glad to see the price reduction.

[GtrsRGr8]

Many of us recognize that The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City ("The Met") is a world-class art museum, housing one of the finest and most comprehensive collections in the world. Unfortunately, probably most of us will never have an opportunity to visit The Met for ourselves to see its art treasures.

Well, the next best thing to being there in person might be to view a catalog of at least the best of its collection. The Met has published at least two editions of the book Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which readers could view the best of their collection and also read expert commentary about each work. People have loved this book, as seen by the 4.5 (4) stars rating at Amazon and the 4.10 (41) rating at GoodReads on the most recent edition. Sadly, though, the book is currently out of print.

Perhaps partly because of its out-of-print status, The Met has published this book in pdf. I am happy to say that The Met is graciously offering this 320-page book free at the present time. It is the most recent edition (2004). To get the ebook, you can use this direct link. The ebook will automatically start downloading when you click on the link (or at least it does for me).

[Froide]

Originally Posted by GtrsRGr8

Many of us recognize that The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City ("The Met") is a world-class art museum, housing one of the finest and most comprehensive collections in the world. Unfortunately, probably most of us will never have an opportunity to visit The Met for ourselves to see its art treasures.

Well, the next best thing to being there in person might be to view a catalog of at least the best of its collection. The Met has published at least two editions of the book Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in which readers could view the best of their collection and also read expert commentary about each work. People have loved this book, as seen by the 4.5 (4) stars rating at Amazon and the 4.10 (41) rating at GoodReads on the most recent edition. Sadly, though, the book is currently out of print.

Perhaps partly because of its out-of-print status, The Met has published this book in pdf. I am happy to say that The Met is graciously offering this 320-page book free at the present time. It is the most recent edition (2004). To get the ebook, you can use this direct link. The ebook will automatically start downloading when you click on the link (or at least it does for me).

Here's another, from 2006:
Masterpieces of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Burn, Barbara (2006)


Table of contents

Introduction
Philippe de Montebello

The Ancient World
Egypt
The Ancient Near East
Greece and Rome
The Middle Ages
Medieval Europe
The Islamic World
The Renaissance
Southern Europe
Northern Europe
The Seventeenth Century in Europe
Asia
India and Southeast Asia
China
Japan
1700–1900 in Europe and the United States
Europe
The United States of America
Africa, Oceania, and the Americas
Africa
Oceania
Precolumbian America
The Twentieth Century

Index

[HarryT]

The Met have literally hundreds of PDFs available for free download. I've used a lot of them for my Egyptology degree course. This almost certainly is not a limited time offer.