FREE/BARGAIN — Non-Fiction

[sufue]

In the Beginning . . .: Science Faces God in the Book of Genesis by Isaac Asimov has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle US. I've been wanting to read this for a long time, and am happy to see it finally drop in price.

link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KQZY532

Spoiler:

In the Beginning: Science Faces God in the Book of Genesis. The beginning of time. The origin of life. In our Western civilization, there are two influential accounts of beginnings. One is the biblical account, compiled more than two thousand years ago by Judean writers who based much of their thinking on the Babylonian astronomical lore of the day. The other is the account of modern science, which, in the last century, has slowly built up a coherent picture of how it all began. Both represent the best thinking of their times, and in this line-by-line annotation of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, Isaac Asimov carefully and evenhandedly compares the two accounts, pointing out where they are similar and where they are different.

“There is no version of primeval history, preceding the discoveries of modern science, that is as rational and as inspiriting as that of the Book of Genesis,” Asimov says. However, human knowledge does increase, and if the biblical writers “had written those early chapters of Genesis knowing what we know today, we can be certain that they would have written it completely differently.” Isaac Asimov brings to this fascinating subject his wide-ranging knowledge of science and history—and his award-winning ability to explain the complex with accuracy, clarity, and wit.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by sufue

In the Beginning . . .: Science Faces God in the Book of Genesis by Isaac Asimov has dropped to $1.99 at Kindle US. I've been wanting to read this for a long time, and am happy to see it finally drop in price.

link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KQZY532

Drat - not on sale at Amazon UK!

[sufue]

Again at £0.99...probably the most famous (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) book of Diamond's. Link below is still good.

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

UK Deal of the Day

Guns, Germs And Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13000 Years by Jared Diamond 99p

Recommended


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Guns-Germs-...dp/B00DQ8GDV8/

[sufue]

Nicholas and Alexandra: The Classic Account of the Fall of the Romanov Dynasty by Robert K. Massie is a US Kindle Daily Deal today at $1.99, matched at Kobo US.

Kindle US: https://www.amazon.com/Nicholas-Alex...dp/B004KPM23Y/
Kobo US: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/nic...nd-alexandra-1

Spoiler:

The story of the love that ended an empire

In this commanding book, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert K. Massie sweeps readers back to the extraordinary world of Imperial Russia to tell the story of the Romanovs’ lives: Nicholas’s political naïveté, Alexandra’s obsession with the corrupt mystic Rasputin, and little Alexis’s brave struggle with hemophilia. Against a lavish backdrop of luxury and intrigue, Massie unfolds a powerful drama of passion and history—the story of a doomed empire and the death-marked royals who watched it crumble.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Robert K. Massie's Catherine the Great.

[HarryT]

Bernstein and Woodward's classic "All the President's Men" is a part of the Amazon UK Monthly deal for 99p:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Preside.../dp/B00AE8ZBM0

I've just bought it!

[Alastair_S]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Bernstein and Woodward's classic "All the President's Men" is a part of the Amazon UK Monthly deal for 99p:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/All-Preside.../dp/B00AE8ZBM0

I've just bought it!

Not just Amazon, Kobo UK is also having a sale and "All the President's Men" (for the same price of 99p) is one of the books on offer.

https://www.kobo.com/gb/en/ebook/all...resident-s-men

[GtrsRGr8]

In its formatting (xhtml), it's like a cross between a dissertation and a book. In content, it's probably close to being a scholarly monograph or a Master's thesis. However, it's close enough to being a true ebook that I don't think that anyone will have a problem with that.

It's The New Politics of Russia: Interpreting Change, by Andrew Monaghan, published by the revered Manchester University. The subject could hardly be more timely, although one could wish that this tome was slightly more recent (it's copyrighted 2016).

You can't argue with the price, however: it's free, due to it being an open access edition. Spring for the ordinary ebook edition at Amazon, and it will set you back nearly $15.

Because of the scholarly nature of the work, ratings are hard to come by, but the ones that I've found are good to very good.

http://www.oapen.org/view?docId=613235.xhtml.

[GlenBarrington]

[QUOTE=GtrsRGr8;3798602]In its formatting (xhtml), it's like a cross between a dissertation and a book. In content, it's probably close to being a scholarly monograph or a Master's thesis. However, it's close enough to being a true ebook that I don't think that anyone will have a problem with that.

It's The New Politics of Russia: Interpreting Change, by Andrew Monaghan, published by the revered Manchester University. The subject could hardly be more timely, although one could wish that this tome was slightly more recent (it's copyrighted 2016).

You can't argue with the price, however: it's free, due to it being an open access edition. Spring for the ordinary ebook edition at Amazon, and it will set you back nearly $15.

Because of the scholarly nature of the work, ratings are hard to come by, but the ones that I've found are good to very good.

http://www.oapen.org/view?docId=613235.xhtml.[/QUOTE

Thanks for this! I don't see that it is downloadable, but the Reading view of the Edge browser renders it very nicely as a readable document!

[bgalbrecht]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

Thanks for this! I don't see that it is downloadable, but the Reading view of the Edge browser renders it very nicely as a readable document!

If you go to this page, you can download it as either HTML or PDF.

[j.p.s]

$2.40 today only
A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes
by Adam Rutherford
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XP9Z5TS/

I haven't read it yet, but I will probably let it jump to very near the top of my TBR stack.

If you think this book isn't for you, I suggest doing at least a little research about it.

[GtrsRGr8]

Originally Posted by bgalbrecht

If you go to this page, you can download it as either HTML or PDF.

First, my apologies to GlenBarrington and any others who tried, unsuccessfully, to download the document with the formatting intact (or improved on!).

I'm working on getting the whole document in one file, using another method. Don't know if it will work or not . . . .

Thanks, bgalbrecht, for the heads up. Do you know if it is possible to download the entire PDF at one time, or do you have to download it chapter-by-chapter? I have done the chapter-by-chapter thing before--I created a file folder, labeled it with the author and title, and downloaded all of the chapters into the folder. There's got to be a better way (I hope), though.

I don't mean to embarass you, bgalbrecht, but when I opened your link, I got stung very badly by a bunch of flying insects! I think that they must have been hornets which came out of the Manchester OpenHive.

[GtrsRGr8]

I admit defeat.

I tried using Google Docs. Thought that it would be simple with it. I didn't know that Google Docs could be so complicated.

I may try bringing the problem up on one of the MobileRead subforums which covers such things, but I've read through numerous webpages, and watched a YouTube video or two, without any success with them.

It looks like bgalbrecht has the best answer so far.

[GtrsRGr8]

I found the whole book in one PDF file, thanks to the information that bgalbrecht gave us.

Here's how to get the ebook:
1. Return to the Manchester OpenHive's webpage for the ebook; you may need to use this URL.
2. On the far righthand side, there will be a blue hexagon with a white arrow thingie inside of it. Click on it.
3. A partial webpage (filling about 3/4 of the aforementioned webpage, starting from the righthand edge), will appear.
4. Find "Full Book Download" in the menu. Click on it, the down arrow, or anywhere between them.
5. In the drop-down menu that appears, select the "Full book PDF download (with hyperlinks)" option.
6. The book will be saved to your hard drive; open the file at will.

[MickeyC]

Warped Passages
Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions

by Lisa Randall

Available for $2.99 from Amazon, Kobo and Apple Books


Synopsis

The universe has many secrets. It may hide additional dimensions of space other than the familier three we recognize. There might even be another universe adjacent to ours, invisible and unattainable . . . for now.
Warped Passages is a brilliantly readable and altogether exhilarating journey that tracks the arc of discovery from early twentieth-century physics to the razor's edge of modern scientific theory. One of the world's leading theoretical physicists, Lisa Randall provides astonishing scientific possibilities that, until recently, were restricted to the realm of science fiction. Unraveling the twisted threads of the most current debates on relativity, quantum mechanics, and gravity, she explores some of the most fundamental questions posed by Nature—taking us into the warped, hidden dimensions underpinning the universe we live in, demystifying the science of the myriad worlds that may exist just beyond our own.

[Difflugia]

Joel S. Baden's The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero is $1.99.

Kobo
B&N
Google Play
Amazon

I bought this book a few years ago when it was on sale and loved it. Baden is an Old Testament textual scholar that convincingly reconstructs what he thinks is the real story of David from the biblical books of Samuel. In a nutshell, David was the leader of a band of ruffians that usurped Saul's throne by force with the help of Israel's enemies. Here's the opening paragraph of the introduction, describing the events of 1 Samuel 25:

In a small village in Israel, some three thousand years ago, there lived a man and his wife who owned flocks of sheep and goats that grazed in the fields some distance from the village. One spring day, ten men appeared in the village. They were messengers from a larger gang of fugitives from society who roamed the countryside living as they could. They presented the man with a request: they had been protecting the man’s flocks and shepherds out in the fields and no harm had come to the man’s property, so now they would like the man to give them some money or food for their efforts. The man, who had never encountered this gang before, much less asked them to protect his property, refused to give them anything and turned them away. The next day, the leader of the gang showed up at the man’s door with his full entourage, four hundred men armed to the teeth. Shortly thereafter, the man lay dead, and the gang leader had married the man’s widow, thereby assuming legal ownership of the man’s flocks, servants, house, and fields.

I recommend having a Bible on hand while reading the book. For me, the most fascinating thing was the wealth of detail present in the biblical text that the author points out, but that I would otherwise have missed on my own.